Appendix A: The macro view
Sources and evidence for key claims
This appendix provides third-party evidence and source references for the macro claims underpinning the Allocator One investment thesis.
A.1 The growth of private markets and venture capital
Private markets AUM expansion:
- Bain & Company (2025): Projects that global private markets AUM (including private equity, venture capital, private credit, and real assets) could reach $60–65 trillion by 2032, compounding at roughly 9–10% annually.
- Ocorian Global Asset Monitor (2025): Estimates that private markets funds alone could grow about 70% to $23.9 trillion by 2030 from ~$14 trillion today.
- Investment News / Industry estimates: Private equity AUM could approach $11–12 trillion by 2030, with venture capital as a fast-growing slice of that broader pool.
Venture capital AUM growth:
- Fortune / PitchBook (2025): North American VC AUM roughly doubled between 2019 and 2024 and is projected to grow another ~38% to $1.81 trillion by 2029.
- Cambridge Associates (2025): US PE/VC benchmark commentary confirms continued growth in venture allocations among institutional investors.
Implication: Hundreds of billions to low trillions of new dollars are likely to flow into venture over the coming decade as part of a much larger private markets expansion.
A.2 Why smaller and emerging managers outperform
Multiple independent sources find that smaller and emerging VC funds tend to outperform larger, established vehicles:
Cambridge Associates
- Analysis of 30 years of VC vintages shows that funds under $150 million outperformed larger funds in 19 of 30 vintages from 1981–2010.
- Emerging and smaller funds appear disproportionately in the top performance quartiles.
- New and developing firms (typically Fund I–II and III–IV) have represented ~70%+ of top-performing VC funds in certain vintages (2004–2016 analysis).
Kauffman Foundation
- Landmark report "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us" (2012) found:
- Among the large VC funds in its portfolio, only 4 of 30 funds over $400 million beat a public small-cap benchmark
- No fund over $500 million returned more than 2x net to LPs
- This strongly suggests that performance deteriorates as fund size scales.
Fund Size vs Performance Studies
- PitchBook / Santé Ventures (1979–2018 vintages):
- 25% of funds below $350 million achieved ≥2.5x TVPI versus only 17% of funds above $750 million
- Net IRRs of 17.4% vs 9.7% respectively
- Carta (2024 data):
- For recent vintages, the 90th percentile TVPI for $1–10M funds is over 4x versus ~1.7x for $100M+ funds
- Invesco / Gridline analysis:
- Smaller funds (<$400M) produced ~20%+ IRR
- Mid-sized funds ~7%
- Billion-dollar mega-funds in the low single digits
First-Time Fund Performance
- PitchBook: 18% of first-time funds achieve IRR ≥25% versus 12% for seasoned funds
Implication: Smaller and emerging VC funds have historically delivered meaningfully higher net returns than large, established mega-funds, often on the order of 2x or more in IRR and TVPI terms over long periods.
A.3 The scale of new fund formation
While no single dataset perfectly captures global VC fund formation, several sources point to hundreds to more than a thousand new VC firms and funds launched globally each year:
US Fund Counts
- NVCA / PitchBook (2025): 538 US VC funds were raised in 2024 alone.
- Juniper Square (2025): Reports similar numbers for new US funds in their 2024 venture capital review.
Global Firm Creation
- Crunchbase-derived analysis: Finds 27,000+ VC firms globally as of early 2024 and estimates that net new VC firms have averaged ~1,300 per year over the last two decades, after accounting for closures and consolidations.
Emerging Manager Pipelines
- VC Lab (2025): Their programs alone worked with 850 emerging managers in 2024, which they estimate is roughly half of all new VC firms launched globally that year.
Implication: The universe of emerging funds is large and fragmented. Any platform that can systematically screen 1,000+ GPs per year is operating at the frontier of the market.
A.4 The cost and time burden of launching a first-time fund
For first-time GPs, launching a VC fund is both time- and cost-intensive:
Fundraising Timelines
- Private equity fundraising data: Median timelines reached ~19 months in 2024, up from ~14 months in 2022.
- Solo GP guidance: First-time solo VC funds typically take 6–12 months to first close and 12–18 months to final close, after 2–3 years of preparation.
Operational and Setup Costs
- Sifted (2024): Review of first-time VC fund operating costs estimates:
- Regulatory, compliance, legal, and fund-level administrative costs alone often total $75,000–150,000 per year
- Total operating and overhead costs easily reach hundreds of thousands of dollars over the first few years of a small fund's life
- Sapphire Capital Partners: Describes multi-month setup processes with substantial legal and structuring spend.
- EUVC: Notes that most emerging managers regret their first fund structure due to complexity and cost.
Implication: Traditional fund formation is slow (often 12–18 months) and expensive (hundreds of thousands in non-investment costs). This provides context for the value of an integrated infrastructure platform like Infra One.
A.5 Private markets, tokenization, and infrastructure
Several reports suggest that private markets and tokenized products will play an increasingly central role in global asset management:
Share of Global AuM
- PwC Global Asset & Wealth Management Report (2025):
- Total global AuM will rise from $139 trillion in 2024 to around $200 trillion by 2030
- Private markets set to account for more than half of global AuM by 2030 as institutions and wealth managers increase allocations to alternatives
Tokenized Funds
- PwC (2025): Projects tokenized fund AuM to grow from $90 billion in 2024 to approximately $715 billion in 2030, a 41% compound annual growth rate, as digital infrastructure and regulation mature.
Implication: These trends reinforce the strategic logic of owning the infrastructure layer (Infra One) that services fund managers and can plug into future tokenization and secondary-market workflows.
A.6 AI, infrastructure, and the composition of VC flows
Recent venture market studies highlight the growing concentration of VC deployments into AI and infrastructure-related themes:
AI Share of VC Funding
- KPMG Venture Pulse (Q4 2024):
- In Q4 2024, $108.6 billion in global VC funding, with AI mega-rounds dominating (Databricks, OpenAI, xAI, Waymo, Anthropic)
- BIP Ventures (2025):
- AI-related ventures accounted for ~46% of US VC deal value in 2024
- Bain & Company Global VC Outlook (2025):
- First half of 2025 saw AI funding surpassing 2024 totals
- Software and AI account for ~45% of VC funding
Resilience of Infrastructure and Software
- Despite cyclical pullbacks, software, data infrastructure, and AI remain the largest and most resilient categories in global VC allocations, both in number of deals and total capital invested.
Implication: For an allocator with deep access to emerging managers in AI, software, and infrastructure—and with an owned operational platform—this concentration of capital underscores the potential to translate macro tailwinds into platform-level AuM and fee growth.
A.7 The structural impact of fee stacking
While no single paper quantifies the exact "56%" advantage of a 2/20 single-layer fee model versus a 3/30 stacked fund-of-funds structure, several analyses highlight how fee drag meaningfully erodes LP net returns:
Cost Burden on Small Funds
- Sifted (2024): For smaller funds, management fees and fund operating costs can absorb 25% or more of committed capital over the fund life, heavily impacting net DPI for LPs.
Performance vs Size
- Studies from Kauffman, Cambridge Associates, and various allocator commentaries show that larger funds with higher organizational overhead often deliver materially lower net IRRs than smaller, leaner vehicles.
Illustrative Math Using standard VC fee conventions:
- Single layer: 2% management fee for 10 years plus 20% carry at the GP level
- Stacked FoF: Additional 1%+10% at a fund-of-funds level (total 3%+30%)
On a 3–4x gross MOIC portfolio over 10–12 years, LPs can retain on the order of 50–60% more net profit by paying a single 2/20 layer versus a stacked 3/30 structure. This is a structural advantage, independent of any selection alpha.
A.8 Context for Allocator One's growth targets
Allocator One's internal targets sit within a broader context of rapid private markets growth:
| Target | Allocator One Goal | Market Context |
|---|---|---|
| AuM by 2030 | ~€1.6 billion across fund products | VC AUM in North America alone expected to grow ~38% to $1.81 trillion by 2029 |
| AuA by 2030 | €6–10 billion across Infra One | Private markets funds projected to grow to $23.9 trillion by 2030 |
Implication: These macro projections suggest ample headroom for specialized, infrastructure-enabled platforms like Allocator One + Infra One to scale within a structurally expanding private capital universe.