Vintage year is the year a venture capital fund started deploying capital, typically the year of the fund's first investment or first capital call. The convention applies across PE funds, real estate funds, and other private investment vehicles, and is used by LPs and fund analysts to compare fund performance against peer funds from the same market environment and vintage cohort. It is a critical metric for evaluating fund manager skill versus market timing because funds raised in different years face dramatically different market conditions.
The structural logic: a 2020 vintage fund deploying $200M during 2020-2025 entered the market at very different valuations than a 2022 vintage fund deploying the same capital during 2022-2...