Venture renewed
its climb

After two years of valuation compression and muted exits, 2024 marked a stabilization year and 2025 showed measureable recovery. Total value to paid-in (TVPI) multiples moved higher across nearly ever recent vintage, supported by NAV gains tied to AI-driven improving public comps, and more disciplined portfolio construction. As of Q2 2025, median net TVPI increased for every fund vintage from 2017 through 2023, marking an unusually broad-based inflection rather than a narrow rebound.

Top-performing funds proved they could still deliver: upper-quartile TVPI for 2017 vintage reached roughly 2.7x, while 2018 vintages approached 2.3x, reinforcing the durability of well-constructed portfolios even through a prolonged exit slowdown. More recent vintages of 2019-2022 are still maturing and generally sit below the 2.0x threshold, though performance trajectories have improved as valuation pressure has eased.

The 2021 and 2022 vintages—often cited as “peak” years—are only three to four years old. Median IRRs for those cohorts moved back into positive territory by Q2 2025, signaling that the steepest portion of the drawdown phase has likely passed. At the top end, dispersion is already emerging: top-decile IRRs for 2022-vintage funds approached 19%, exceeding the strongest 2021 funds. This early inversion reinforces the advantage of deploying capital during the 2022–2023 reset, when entry valuations compressed and ownership levels improved.

Distributions (DPI) have improved more gradually, but that reflects timing—not necessarily value impairment. Since 2017, even top-quartile venture funds have generated DPI of roughly 0.8x, underscoring how much enterprise value remains unrealized across the asset class. That unrealized value is highly concentrated in scaled private leaders that are widely expected to generate power-law returns.

Companies such as OpenAI, Stripe, SpaceX, Databricks, Anthropic, Anduril, Canva, and others represent multi-decade platforms with expanding revenue bases, durable competitive moats, and significant optionality across IPO, M&A, and secondary pathways. Many of these businesses are compounding revenue at scale, improving margins, and operating in structurally growing markets such as AI infrastructure, defense technology, fintech infrastructure, space, and enterprise data platforms. Investors in these companies often have partial liquidity through structured secondaries or private share sales, but many are choosing patience given the magnitude of potential long-term outcomes.