While listening to VC fund managers’ prognostications in January for the venture industry this year, Venture Capital Journal was told to expect more consolidation of cash-strapped start-ups within verticals in light of more challenging fundraising conditions.

Some VC fund managers will drive mature companies in their portfolios to acquire smaller competitors as an alternative growth path, Navigate Ventures founding partner Ivan Nikkhoo told us. In many markets, too many start-ups are competing for customers, further inflating their customer acquisition and retention costs, he said.

John Tough, a partner at Energize Capital, told us that several of the climate management software companies in its portfolio generating revenue in excess of $100 million are “using their scale advantage of lower cost of capital to target acquisition offers.” This is a clear shift from the strategy in recent years to grow through customer acquisition, with bolt-ons to add revenue and new products now seen as more cost-effective.

VC funds themselves are becoming more open to secondaries deals to generate liquidity for their LPs. Last month, Primary Venture Partners completed a $95 million secondary strip sale to StepStone Group, generating liquidity for limited partners in its first fund, VCJ previously reported. StepStone partner Hunter Somerville told us he is seeing more potential buyers coming in off the sidelines. “As people have taken their medicine and have done discretionary markdowns, things have now mostly settled to a point where it’s time to consider it,” Somerville said.

A handful of deep tech VCs in the Boston area have opted for a different strategy that they believe can leverage each other’s deal flow and technical knowledge, as well as their distinctive professional networks. Last week, Anzu Partners, Hitachi Ventures (the corporate venture arm of the IT systems company), SkyRiver Ventures and Myriad Venture Partners launched venx, which is believed to be the first collaborative hub for deep tech venture firms. The hub is located in roughly 5,000 square feet of shared office space in Boston’s downtown financial district. The space is provided by The Steele Group, a real estate consulting firm that has offered scale-ups advice on when and how to expand their operations and office space.

Although the four firms, whose assets under management total more than $1 billion, focus on various stages of investment in deep tech and will continue to raise separate funds, they have similar mindsets.

“We believe that coming together creates a bigger pie, that the pie’s not limited,” said Hyuk-Jeen Suh, CEO and general partner at SkyRiver, which is investing from its debut fund. “Especially in the deep tech world, some of this scientific research that is done can be risky. And by having more VC funds together we can leverage and diversify our dollars and our portfolio more and also help each other to follow up in next rounds if needed.”

In addition to enabling the founding VCs to diversify their portfolios and share knowledge, the hub is expected to be helpful to entrepreneurs. “There’s more opportunities for great deep tech companies to be funded,” Suh noted. “A lot of times they have trouble just finding the VCs – and this is a place to come together to do that.”

John Ho, a partner at Anzu, told VCJ that the tougher macroeconomic environment makes this a good time for this kind of collaborative effort. “It’s tough out there for VCs to do it yourself, to be a lone wolf,” Ho said. “Fundraising is harder. Keeping your companies alive is harder. All of that isn’t lost on us.”

He added: “To some extent there is some safety in having numbers of folks who can write a check or introduce you to the right customer that can save this company through a commercial deal.”

Ho said he doesn’t expect venx by itself to stave off the mass consolidation in the VC ecosystem that some have predicted. “But I do think we can play a small part of helping VC firms level up and punch above their weight class, especially as we share services and things like that.”

Both Ho and Suh said the hub will be open to other deep tech-focused VCs that share a similar mindset and it will likely evolve its model to accommodate more VCs as needed.

“If we can expand this, it will only help us. Our networks are only so big,” said Ho. “There’s global companies out there that should be customers of all of our portfolio companies that aren’t aware of our technology. How do we get in front of them? You’ve got to have the right network. And I firmly believe the more folks we can add to this collective, the better access we’ll have, the better results we’ll have.”