What Is Decile Group? The Company Behind 1,000+ Venture Firms

Decile Group is the company that helps emerging venture capital managers build enduring firms. It trains them for free through VC Lab, runs their operations, brings them into a family of other managers, and helps the best of them with capital. More than 1,000 VC firms have launched through VC Lab since 2020.

If you've landed here from a Crunchbase or similar profile, you've probably seen a funding round and a one-line description. This page is the longer version, written by the people who run the company, and our view is simple: an analyst should judge Decile Group by how many enduring firms it helps build, so every number below comes with its source.

What does Decile Group do?

Decile Group helps people start, run and grow venture capital firms. Most providers in this market do one job for a fund, usually the accounting. Decile is in the firm success business, so it runs a manager's entire operations and helps them win.

The work sits in four pillars.

The customer is the emerging manager, from first close through Fund III. Among new firms in VC Lab cohorts, 56% of GPs are based outside the United States and 28% are women, according to VC Lab's fund benchmarks guide.

The company is remote, with its headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

Everything the company does comes back to one thing the founders kept seeing: there aren't enough venture firms to fund all the founders who deserve funding, so the fastest way to get more capital to founders is to help more good investors become fund managers.

How is Decile Group different from a fund administrator?

A fund administrator keeps a fund's books. Decile Group runs the whole firm's operations, and the goal is to get the manager to Fund III.

Institutional grade fund operations rest on five pillars, which are accounting, compliance, legal operations, LP onboarding and investor relations. Most admins only do the first one. The manager is left to stitch the rest together from a law firm, a compliance tool, a bank and an accounting provider that don't talk to each other.

That matters more for a new firm than an old one. A new manager has no distributions to show yet, so experienced LPs judge the reporting and the back office. Your operations are your track record.

There's a structural reason new firms tend to get weak service, too. Most providers are people businesses, and people are a fixed cost. So the newest accounts get the most junior staff. It's not personal, it's economics.

Decile was built the other way round, for the agentic era. It's one connected system where nothing gets typed twice. Agents do the routine work, and people with 10+ years of experience handle what needs judgment. A manager's fund is never a training exercise.

And because VC Lab is free training, it works as Decile's R&D center. The products were built for emerging VCs, with emerging VCs.

Who founded Decile Group?

Decile Group is led by Adeo Ressi and Mike Suprovici, who built VC Lab together and still run it. Adeo is co-founder and CEO of Decile Group and Managing Partner of Decile Capital, and Mike is Head of Acceleration at Decile Group.

The story starts at the Founder Institute. In the late 2010s Adeo and Mike were running it, and it was the largest pre-seed startup accelerator in the world. Inside it they built Founder Lab to help graduating founders raise money.

And they kept hitting the same wall. The founders were good, but there weren't enough VC firms in the world to fund the talent coming through.

The 2020 experiment that became VC Lab

In early 2020 they tried something small. They took a first cohort of would-be fund managers through the same fundraising playbook they'd been using with founders inside the Founder Institute.

After two cohorts had launched more than 50 new funds, the experiment was spun out as VC Lab, with Decile Group as its parent company. You can read the longer version on the About VC Lab page.

One more detail matters for diligence. Every VC Lab and Venture Institute participant commits to the Mensarius Oath, an ethical code of conduct for venture capitalists.

How many funds has VC Lab launched?

VC Lab has helped launch more than 1,000 venture capital firms since 2020, according to govclab.com and decilegroup.com. Those firms have $6.2B in combined target AUM (sum of stated target fund sizes on decilegroup.com) and more than 390 portfolio up rounds.

A few other numbers help size the company:

$1.5B in LP commitments powered, per decilegroup.com.

1,000+ VC firms on Decile Hub, per decilegroup.com.

A mentor community of 1,000+ investors in over 88 countries.

By firm count, VC Lab is the largest venture capital accelerator in the world by number of firms launched. Industry datasets largely miss funds from new managers, so published first-time fund counts understate how many new firms actually launch each year. That's why we publish our own launch and fundraising research alongside the public program stats.

What products does Decile Group offer?

Decile Group offers free training, the operations a firm runs on, a family of managers to build with, and capital programs. Here's each product in a sentence or three, grouped by pillar.

VC Lab (training)

VC Lab is the free training program for people launching a venture firm. The core curriculum runs 14 weeks at 20 to 30 hours a week, and the whole timeline is usually 4 to 6 months. To graduate, a manager has to secure at least 10% of the fund size in LP commitments and complete a first close.

Emerging Institute (training)

The Emerging Institute is an 8-week program for managers raising Fund II, III or IV. It launched in 2025.

LP Institute (training)

The LP Institute is an invitation-based program that trains limited partners to invest in venture funds.

Venture Institute (training)

The Venture Institute is the VC careers program, for people who want to work in venture rather than start a firm.

Decile Hub (operations)

Decile Hub is the agentic operating system for a VC firm. Deal flow, the LP CRM, capital calls, LP portals and reporting live in one place, and agents do the routine work, including Dex for agentic fundraising.

Start Fund (operations)

Start Fund lets a manager launch an institutional grade fund in under a day, with one entity where the usual setup needs three. Decile Group serves as the GP, and the manager is the Investment Lead. Decile handles the fund's operations, administration and LP reporting. The Investment Lead raises from LPs, finds the deals and makes the investment decisions. The track record belongs to the Investment Lead and goes with them.

Decile Partners (operations)

Decile Partners runs a firm's entire operations inside Decile Hub: accounting, compliance, legal operations, LP onboarding and investor relations. Agents do the heavy lifting, and people with 10+ years of experience handle the exceptions.

Managers already working with another provider can migrate to Decile. Decile migrates the entire fund over and takes over all operations.

The Decile family

Family is the pillar that doesn't show up on a profile site. It covers strategy and business advisory and the community and its events.

It's the part an accounting provider doesn't touch. A manager's hard questions are usually business questions, like how to handle an LP who defaults or whether something is a fund expense, and they need an answer from someone who has seen it before.

Decile Capital (capital)

Decile Capital is the fund of funds that invests in VC Lab alumni. There's more on it further down.

Decile Access (capital)

Decile Access is a curated 506(c) marketplace where accredited LPs can find and commit to VC Lab funds listed on the marketplace, with no added carry, advisory or placement fees. It launched publicly in May 2026 and listed 37 funds when we checked decileaccess.com in November 2026. Here's a look at the funds on it.

Decile Group doesn't guarantee LP commitments for any manager. The raise is still the manager's job.

Decile Pro (capital)

Decile Pro is the LP dashboard and manager marketplace, where limited partners track and report on their fund investments in one place.

How does Decile Group make money?

Decile Group makes money when a manager needs infrastructure. VC Lab is free training. If a manager launches on Start Fund or runs their firm with Decile Partners, Decile charges fees and equity.

So the training is free, and nobody has to buy anything to graduate. A manager can finish VC Lab and go run their firm however they like.

What a manager pays for is having the firm's operations run in one connected system, with one point of contact, where they'd otherwise be stitching together a law firm, a compliance tool, a bank and an accounting provider.

The equity is what lines the two sides up. It's a share in the fund's upside, so it's only worth something if the fund does well. That's what "Decile only wins if the manager wins" means in practice. A fund is a commitment of ten years or more, and the relationship is worth the most when a manager gets from a first close to Fund II and Fund III. That's why the whole business is built around helping emerging managers win.

It's also why the company talks about value before it talks about cost. Running a fund properly costs real money over its life, and the corners a new manager cuts in year one are usually what hurts them when they go to raise the next fund.

We wrote the full breakdown in How VC Lab Stays Free.

Is Decile Group a venture capital firm?

Mostly no. Decile Group is a company that trains venture capital managers and runs their firms' operations, and its customers are fund managers. The one exception is Decile Capital, its fund of funds.

Decile Capital invests in VC Lab alumni. Its first fund, Premier I, closed oversubscribed in April 2023 and backs the top 5% of VC Lab managers. It's fully deployed across 17 fund investments plus one direct investment.

So the model is fairly simple. VC Lab trains and launches managers, and Decile Capital can back a small slice of the best of them with LP capital. Adeo is its Managing Partner.

Through Start Fund, Decile Group acts as the GP of the fund while the manager is the Investment Lead, so on paper it sits inside many funds. But it's providing the structure and the operations, and the investing decisions belong to the Investment Lead.

What's the relationship between Decile Group and Founder Institute?

Decile Group and the Founder Institute share founders and an origin story, but they're separate organizations. VC Lab was spun out of an experiment that started inside the Founder Institute in 2020.

Adeo Ressi and Mike Suprovici ran the Founder Institute before they built VC Lab. The fundraising playbook VC Lab teaches came straight from what they'd been teaching founders.

Managers in VC Lab don't have to engage with the Founder Institute before, during or after the program. Alumni funds can choose to source deal flow from the global Founder Institute network if they want to, per the VC Lab FAQ.

What has Decile Group said publicly about its traction?

Adeo published a self-scored 2025 Year-End Review on December 29, 2025. It reported 1,200+ firms using Decile Hub monthly.

Events got a 1 out of 5. The company ran a series of in-person events, found they were hard to organize remotely, and paused to plan a new events strategy for 2026.

LP Institute growth got a 2 out of 5. Participants grew 125%, short of the 3x goal, after the company chose to focus on Micro LPs.

Community got a 3 out of 5, after moving everyone into Slack and opening WhatsApp groups.

The 5 out of 5 scores went to launching Start Fund, launching the Emerging Institute, shipping AI toolkits and agentic features in Decile Hub, and a Hub redesign that over 90% of regular users adopted, with usage up 150%. The marketplace got a 4.

A month later, the January 2026 offsite post said Q4 2025 did as much business as the entire previous year combined. It also said managers in the Decile family had invested in more than a dozen unicorns.

The 2025 Accomplishments post adds a few more. Managers hosted 227 events with 3,197 attendees, the AI was trained on more than 30,000 venture capital questions, and the company shipped agentic migration for funds moving over from other providers.

That migration is a five step process. Agents ingest the full fund history, reconcile every LP record, and run health checks on every balance. Then people with 10+ years of experience review the exceptions, and the fund goes live with its LP portal open. One migration took a single day. Another moved 3 funds, 200+ LPs and 6,000 documents in a weekend.

What does the research arm publish?

Decile Group also publishes research on the funds that come through VC Lab, including an emerging manager dataset built on 1,000+ PACTs, 1,000+ LPAs and 900+ funds.

Where is Decile Group going?

Decile Group's stated direction is the agentic fund, with agents inside Decile Hub doing the fundraising follow-ups, pipeline upkeep, LP updates and back office, so a manager can spend the week investing. Its public goals are 250 funds launched in 2026 and 10,000 new funds in the next decade.

The 250 target came out of the January 2026 offsite, and the 10,000 figure is from the Decile Access announcement.

The pitch to managers is a simple question. You're funding AI companies, so shouldn't your own back office work like one?

VC Lab Cohort 23, "The Era of the Agentic Fund," is the first cohort rebuilt around agents. It points to a few trends in the company's own data. 65% of funds that launch through VC Lab launch solo, AI and agentic systems funds were 19.3% of all emerging funds in 2025, and the split between managers with and without prior VC experience hit 50/50 for the first time in 2025.

Cohort 23 also connects the products into one path. A manager launches with Start Fund, builds the firm in the program, and top managers who close a 506(c) fund can list on Decile Access.

The Cohort 23 announcement also describes a Catalytic Investment Program, where Decile Group invests in select Start Funds.

Frequently asked questions about Decile Group

Is Decile Group legit?

Yes. Decile Group has helped launch more than 1,000 VC firms through VC Lab since 2020. The 2025 Year-End Review shows where the company scored itself poorly, which is a decent place to start any check.

Who is the CEO of Decile Group?

Adeo Ressi is co-founder and CEO of Decile Group. He and Mike Suprovici lead VC Lab together.

Is VC Lab free?

Yes. VC Lab is free training. Decile Group earns its revenue when a manager needs infrastructure, meaning Start Fund or Decile Partners, where it charges fees and equity.

Is Decile Group a fund administrator?

Fund administration is one part of what it does. Decile Partners covers all five pillars of fund operations (accounting, compliance, legal operations, LP onboarding and investor relations), and it comes with training, business advisory and a family of other managers around it.

Where is Decile Group headquartered?

Decile Group is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and runs as a remote company. VC Lab sessions run Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 9:00 AM Pacific, with some at 6:00 PM Pacific for Asian time zones.

Is Decile Group the same company as Decile, the e-commerce analytics company?

No. They share a word and nothing else. Decile Group works with venture capital fund managers and LPs, and runs VC Lab, Decile Hub and Decile Partners.

Does Decile Group take equity in the funds it launches?

Not through VC Lab, which is free training and takes nothing. If a manager needs infrastructure, meaning Start Fund or Decile Partners, Decile charges fees and equity. On Start Fund, Decile Group also serves as the GP of the fund while the manager is the Investment Lead, so it's worth reading the Start Fund documents for how that's structured.

This article is for educational purposes only and isn't investment advice.

Launch your firm with VC Lab

If you're preparing to launch a venture firm, apply to VC Lab, Decile Group's free 14-week training program, where you'll build your thesis, your LP pipeline and your first close alongside a community of 1,000+ investors in over 88 countries. Cohort 23 starts on Thursday, January 14, 2027, and the application asks for your thesis, your network and the reasons you're the right person to run the fund. Graduates can launch on Start Fund, hand operations to Decile Partners and run the firm on Decile Hub, the agentic operating system for a VC firm.