VC as an Asset Class

August 1, 2025 / Monica Zent
Venture Legal 11

“As Figma goes public, a turning point in the long-awaited IPO market recovery takes shape,” read Fortune’s headline. The IPO came after a planned merger with Adobe fell apart in 2023, with the design software unicorn’s offering valued at nearly $20 billion. This milestone reflected broader trends in legal tech investments, where venture-backed companies are increasingly shaping the technology and services used by corporate legal teams and legal service providers.

As Fortune writes, “… Figma could be the harbinger of a simmering truth: that the market for venture-backed IPOs is in a thoughtful recovery,” while also quoting PitchBook’s Derek Hernandez that should Figma “stumble,” “… this may reinforce some caution among late-stage VCs and delay other large tech floats.”

The IPO market is just one path to liquidity for investors, and for this edition, I wanted to dive into venture capital as an asset class, including:

  • IPO optimism and uncertainty
  • The role of M&A
  • Secondaries as “no passing fad”
  • Other novel approaches
  • The overall exit math and the “new normal” for Venture Capital

Follow Monica on Substack and subscribe to read the featured story:

Venture Legal Ed. 11: VC as an Asset Class

  • LegalTech’s “Open Source” Moment!

    By Monica Zent | June 4, 2026

    With AI usage for legal approaching “near-universal” adoption, the sector continues to evolve at an astounding pace. Directly on the heels of the debut of Anthropic’s “Claude for Legal,” which it debuted just shortly before filing for IPO this week, The Information reported last week on a “fresh assault” on LegalTech’s major players: “Some law…

  • Inside “Claude for Legal:” Insights for founders and investors

    By Monica Zent | May 21, 2026

    With potential IPOs on the horizon, the LLM race keeps heating up, and legal is directly in the mix. “Anthropic Was Behind. Now It’s the AI Boom’s Front-Runner,” read the Wall Street Journal’s headline last week, citing a big reason for the company’s surge in the AI race: focusing on enterprise users. While the “AI…

  • Change management in the age of AI: What enterprises, individuals and investors need to know.

    By Monica Zent | May 7, 2026

    We are at a moment in which “innovation creates new industries and businesses and at the same time destroys, or at least destabilizes, jobs and companies,” wrote Axios last week in a story on the AI transition. The article notes that the PC industry did it to mainframe computers, then the mobile industry did it…