How firms get scored.
How the GW GP Score is built: five weighted factors on public evidence, the G1-G6 ladder shared with Gravitywell Ratings, a credit-lens variant for debt platforms, vintage-cycle context, and a point-in-time revision policy.
Five questions · 6 rubrics
Every firm is scored 0-100 as the weighted sum of five factors, each set on public evidence and labelled a GW estimate (E). The five questions are the same for every asset class. The answers, and their weights, are not: realisation means OFS proceeds for a venture fund, scheduled repayment for a lender, and recycling for a sovereign with no fund life.
Read down a column for one class's rubric; read across a row to see how the same question changes shape. Realisation carries 25-30% everywhere — that shared anchor is what keeps the G1-G6 tiers comparable across classes even though the raw scores are not.
| Question | Venturev1.0 | Private equityv1.0 | Private creditv1.0 | Sovereignv1.0 | Crossoverv1.0 | Secondariesv1.0 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What do they hold? | Portfolio quality 25% | Asset quality & control 25% | Book quality & security 25% | Portfolio quality 25% | Book quality & marks 25% | Stake quality 25% |
| Did cash come back? | Exit realisation 30% | Exit realisation 30% | Cash realisation 30% | Realisation & recycling 25% | Realisation 30% | Realisation 30% |
| Is the strategy right for the cycle? | Sector positioning 15% | Value creation 15% | Product & cycle fit 20% | Strategic positioning 20% | Thesis positioning 15% | Cycle fit & sourcing 20% |
| How are they deploying? | Capital velocity 15% | Capital discipline 15% | Capital velocity 10% | Deployment consistency 15% | Redeployment 15% | Capital velocity 10% |
| Will the firm still be there? | Franchise stability 15% | Franchise stability 15% | Franchise stability 15% | Franchise & bench 15% | Franchise stability 15% | Franchise stability 15% |
Venture
gp-venture · v1.0Funds underwriting early- and growth-stage minority equity, returning capital through IPO, M&A and secondaries.
Graded hardest on realisation: Indian venture's binding constraint post-2024 is cash returned, not marks.
- 25%
- Portfolio quality
Unicorn/soonicorn density, up-round momentum, loss ratio in the tracked book.
- 30%
- Exit realisation
IPOs, M&A and secondary sales actually returning cash (DPI signals): the dimension Indian VC is graded hardest on post-2024.
- 15%
- Sector positioning
Alignment of the current book and recent cheques with Gravitywell sector outlooks and the capital cycle.
- 15%
- Capital velocity
Fund cadence, dry powder, discipline of deployment pace against the cycle.
- 15%
- Franchise stability
Team continuity, LP re-up evidence, succession and spin-out risk.
Private equity
gp-private-equity · v1.0Control and significant-minority investors in profitable businesses, returning capital through strategic sales, sponsor-to-sponsor deals and listings.
Unicorn density is meaningless here. The book is graded on earnings quality and on whether returns came from operating improvement rather than leverage or multiple arbitrage.
- 25%
- Asset quality & control
Earnings quality and growth of the held book, and whether stakes carry the control or governance rights to act on it.
- 30%
- Exit realisation
Strategic sales, sponsor-to-sponsor exits, IPO and OFS actually returning cash against fund life.
- 15%
- Value creation
Sector and thesis depth in the controlled book, and evidence that returns came from operating improvement rather than leverage or entry-multiple arbitrage.
- 15%
- Capital discipline
Fundraising cadence and LP demand, entry multiples where disclosed, and deployment pace against the cycle.
- 15%
- Franchise stability
Team continuity, LP re-up evidence, succession and spin-out risk.
Private credit
gp-private-credit · v1.0Venture-debt and alternative-credit managers underwriting downside, returning capital through scheduled repayment rather than exit events.
Credit is graded on what it collects and what it recovers when a borrower breaks — not on the upside of the equity sitting above it.
- 25%
- Book quality & security
Seniority, security package and borrower quality across the lending book.
- 30%
- Cash realisation
Repayment record, yield actually collected, and recovery achieved on stressed credits.
- 20%
- Product & cycle fit
Fit of the lending product to the cycle — counter-cyclical runway when equity reprices — plus borrower-sector concentration.
- 10%
- Capital velocity
Fund cadence and deployment pace; a smaller factor where capital recycles on a repayment schedule.
- 15%
- Franchise stability
Team continuity, LP re-up evidence, succession and spin-out risk.
Sovereign
gp-sovereign · v1.0State-owned and evergreen pools investing off a balance sheet, with no fund life and no LPs to return capital to.
Fund cadence and DPI do not apply to permanent capital. Realisation is graded as recycling, and consistency through the cycle counts for more than timing it.
- 25%
- Portfolio quality
Quality, scale and mark integrity of the India book.
- 25%
- Realisation & recycling
Sell-downs and partial exits recycling capital back into new commitments, absent any fund-life forcing function.
- 20%
- Strategic positioning
Alignment of the book with India's policy direction and Gravitywell sector outlooks.
- 15%
- Deployment consistency
Through-cycle commitment: whether capital kept arriving when the cycle turned.
- 15%
- Franchise & bench
Continuity of the India leadership and the depth of bench behind it — the succession question, for a pool that never winds up.
Crossover
gp-crossover · v1.0Late-stage, evergreen and balance-sheet investors holding across the private-public boundary, often in harvest rather than deployment mode.
These pools have no fund cadence to grade. The live questions are whether the marks are honest against public comps, and whether the sell-down is converting to cash.
- 25%
- Book quality & marks
Quality of the late-stage and listed book, and the integrity of carrying marks.
- 30%
- Realisation
Sell-downs, block trades and listings converting positions to cash — the whole game in harvest mode.
- 15%
- Thesis positioning
Whether the pool has a stated thesis for the current cycle — an AI allocation, a consumer core — or is simply holding what it already owns.
- 15%
- Redeployment
Whether recycled capital is going somewhere with a stated thesis, or simply leaving India.
- 15%
- Franchise stability
Team continuity, LP re-up evidence, succession and spin-out risk.
Secondaries
gp-secondaries · v1.0Buyers of existing private stakes from founders, employees and funds seeking liquidity ahead of a listing.
The return is made at entry. This rubric grades the discount achieved and the access that produced it, not the underlying company's growth.
- 25%
- Stake quality
Quality of the stakes acquired and the discount achieved to the last primary round.
- 30%
- Realisation
Exits achieved on acquired stakes against the 12-24 month pre-IPO thesis.
- 20%
- Cycle fit & sourcing
Fit of the product to the liquidity gap the cycle has opened, and proprietary access to blocked stakes — the scarce input in a market with more buyers than sellers.
- 10%
- Capital velocity
Deployment pace and vehicle cadence.
- 15%
- Franchise stability
Team continuity, LP re-up evidence, succession and spin-out risk.
The ladder: shared with Gravitywell Ratings
Confidence: how sure we are, stated separately
High: audited or regulator-published evidence dominates (listed-company disclosures, rating-agency data, IPO filings).
Medium: tier-1 press and firm statements cross-verified; key figures self-reported but consistent.
Low: young or opaque vehicles: undisclosed fund sizes, unverified claims, pre-deployment firms. Scores here are placeholders that re-rate on facts.
Confidence is shown per firm in the league tables and dossiers. A high score with Low confidence is a hypothesis, not a verdict.
Vintage-cycle context: the macro layer applied to funds
A fund's entry conditions are set the year it deploys, not the year it exits. Every fund vintage in the dossiers carries a cycle-era tag: the same macro read that drives our Capital Cycle Clock and Formation Index, compressed into eras. A 39.5x from a 2009 entry and a markdown from a 2021 entry are the same skill measured in different weather; the tags keep that visible. Editorial mapping, E.
| Vintage | Era | Read |
|---|---|---|
| ≤2013 | Foundation era | Pre-unicorn pricing; discovery-cost entries |
| 2014-16 | First boom | Unicorn discovery; pricing still forming |
| 2017-19 | Expansion | Rational growth vintages |
| 2020 | Covid dislocation | Fear-priced entries: strong vintage in hindsight |
| 2021 | Peak frenzy | Cycle-top entry marks; the vintage still being digested |
| 2022 | Correction onset | Repricing began mid-deployment |
| 2023 | Trough window | Best entry conditions of the cycle |
| 2024-25 | Recovery / IPO window | Exit-led repricing; entry discipline decisive |
| 2026+ | AI repricing | Barbell market: AI premium vs everything else |
Point-in-time policy
Scores never move silently. Every change publishes as a dated score action on the firm's dossier with the reason stated. The current vintage is Sep 2026; coverage is refreshed monthly.
Watch items resolve in public. Each dossier lists the unresolved, dated questions we could not verify at the vintage. On refresh they are confirmed, corrected or dropped, as dated resolutions, never deletions.
Position books are reconstructions. Built from public disclosures only: representative, not exhaustive. Ownership stakes are omitted because they are not reliably public. Credit exposures are tracked separately from equity positions and say so.
Contested claims stay contested. Where reporting conflicts (a denied partner exit, a disputed fund size), the dossier carries both sides with sources rather than resolving by fiat.
Rubrics are versioned too. A rubric is data, not prose: changing a dimension or a weight bumps its version and re-scores every firm graded under it, which publishes as dated score actions — the same contract the index family holds through its methodology version.
Rubric change control
Until this date every tracked firm was graded on the venture factor set, including 19 that are not venture funds. Coverage is now classified into six asset classes, each with its own rubric: dimension meanings and weights differ, while the five underlying questions and the G1-G6 ladder are shared. Published scores became the enforced weighted roll-up of each dossier's factors, which reconciled nine scores by 1-2 points — one of them (Lightspeed India, 70 → 69) across the G2/G3 boundary. Those are arithmetic corrections, not changes of view, and each is logged as a dated score action on its dossier.
Five weighted factors on the G1-G6 ladder shared with Gravitywell Ratings, with a credit-lens reading applied to debt platforms.
Sourcing. Every figure is sourced and dated. We tier provenance: Primary (official, regulatory, exchange or company filings), Secondary (tier-1 industry research and reputable media), and GW estimate (our own reconstruction or opinion, labelled, never presented as external fact). We prefer primary where it exists, reconcile divergent prints to cited ranges, and hold every number point-in-time: dated, and never silently restated; revisions publish as dated changes.
Fact vs opinion. Facts vs opinion: market sizes, official prints, prices, named deals and agency ratings are sourced facts (Primary/Secondary). Scores, grades, purity weights, scenario paths and indicative sparkline points are Gravitywell's analytical opinion (GW estimate): labelled, not presented as external data.
GW GP Scores are research opinions, not investment advice, not a solicitation, and not an assessment under any SEBI regulation. Dossiers are compiled from public sources believed reliable; firms named did not participate and figures marked E are Gravitywell estimates. Point-in-time: dated to the vintage shown and never silently restated.