Road to next
A quarterly report exploring emerging investment trends in private financial markets and the venture capital ecosystem
Q2 2025
The hybrid future: The evolving balance between specialist and generalist VC firms
In this edition of the Road to Next series, we examine the evolving roles of generalist and specialist venture capital (VC) investors in today’s complex dealmaking environment. The first quarter of 2025 saw robust expansion-stage activity in the United States, with both specialist and generalist investors driving growth. Data shows that specialist participation correlated with larger deal sizes and faster, higher-value exits, even as generalists maintained advantages in portfolio diversification.
Four things to know now:
- The variation between expansion-stage deal sizes is historically large, but more recently the averages are closer, suggesting more firms joining in outlier deals.
- So far in 2025 there has been a reversal in valuation growth for specialist investor-joined rounds, potentially due to smaller sample sizes.
- The spread for specialist investment firms can skew significantly upward and downward compared to generalist investment firms.
- There was a spike in specialist-led VC exits counts in 2024, along with a tighter alignment between average and median times to exit for specialist-backed companies.
"Given current levels of uncertainty in markets, executives and investors are trying to plan for multiple contingencies, as well as continuing to focus on investments that have a higher degree of confidence."
Heather Gates, Audit & Assurance Private Growth Leader, Deloitte & Touche LLP
median Q1 expansion-stage deal size (specialists)
niche software development application (specialists)
valuation increase with specialist involvement
