Portfolio Management
Where the cap table stops being a spreadsheet — KPIs, quarterly letters, and valuation marks for what you already own.
The Brief
Sourcing gets the headlines; portfolio management is what your LPs actually grade you on. For most Indian funds, post-investment ops still runs on a Google Sheet, a partner chasing founders on WhatsApp the week before IC, and an associate copy-pasting MIS decks at 2am before the LP call. SEBI AIF Category II reporting cadence — quarterly NAVs, audited annuals, drawdown notices — does not forgive that workflow at fund II and beyond.
The category splits into three shapes. Cap-table and fund admin tools (Carta, Eqvista) are the system of record for ownership and dilution. Portfolio monitoring specialists (Standard Metrics, Vestberry) automate KPI collection and normalise across the book. Integrated fund OS platforms (Taghash, Bunch) collapse dealflow, portfolio, and LP reporting into one contract.
How to approach this stack
How to approach this stack — depending on where your firm is.
- BeginnerCarta or local equivalent for the cap table, plus a disciplined quarterly KPI template in Google Sheets. Stop emailing founders for the same five numbers.
- IntermediateAdd a monitoring layer — Standard Metrics, Vestberry — that pulls KPIs directly, flags drift, and generates the LP quarterly without manual consolidation. Most Indian funds with 20+ companies should live here.
- AdvancedIntegrated fund OS — Taghash, Bunch — where pipeline, ownership, KPIs, NAV, and LP comms share a graph, with AI on top doing portfolio anomaly detection and proactive value-creation prompts.
What to look for when buying
What separates a good portfolio management from a bad one for a venture fund.
- 01Founder-side friction.If your portfolio companies hate the input form, you'll get late, dirty, or no data. Pick the tool founders complete in under ten minutes a quarter.
- 02SEBI AIF reporting fit.Quarterly unaudited NAVs, INR-denominated capital accounts, FEMA-aware foreign LP statements. Global-only tools force a parallel India workbook.
- 03Interoperability with CRM and cap-table source.Affinity or Attio plus Carta plus monitoring should behave like one system, not three.
Common pitfalls
Where portfolio management stacks usually break.
- 01Buying a portfolio OS before you have a portfolio problem.Funds with under 15 companies almost always over-tool. A clean Sheet, a Carta seat, and a non-negotiable quarterly cadence beats a half-adopted platform.
- 02Treating monitoring as LP theatre, not value creation.The point of clean, comparable KPIs is that you spot drift two quarters early and act — intro, hire, bridge, hard conversation. If the data only ever surfaces in the LP letter, you bought the wrong category.