Over the past few quarters I’ve been wondering if we’re seeing a renaissance in venture capital and whether now was actually an ideal time for LPs to be allocating to VC as an asset class.

The arguments in favor of allocating now to VC revolve around the fact that in 2013 we saw net outflows from venture capital with VCs investing $29.4 billion in startups while only raising $16.9 billion for their own funds. And looking back beyond 2013, the last year VCs brought in more than $20 billion into VC as an asset class was 2008. Was it possible that VC was rightsizing?

Rightsizing would mean that less money was chasing the same amount of startups, creating more attractive valuations and returning more value to venture capitalists. While it’s hard to know how favorable capital markets will be in 7-10 years when today’s money will try to exit, the past few years of public market frothiness has shown that it is possible to make plenty of money with public exits. It’s also put some pressure on LPs to chase better returns in the form of venture capital, particularly as many pension funds face high expectations to fund pension obligations for retiring baby boomers.

For the present, public market successes have latter stage VC investors balking at the valuations being presented to them, particularly since it’s getting easier for public market funds to try and get into investments pre-IPO. At the same time the environment sends a basic message that VC continues to have potential as an asset class.

Any way you slice it 2014 is looking like a great rebound for VC allocation. After pulling in almost $18 billion in the first two quarters, Q3 locked up another $6 billion. The $23.7 billion in dollar commitments to venture capital is already bigger than any year in the last five and has the potential to be in the ballpark of the fundraising years of 2005 to 2007 which averaged $30 billion in inflows to VC. The number of new funds, defined as the first fund at a newly established firm, reached 70 through Q3, already 9 more than last year.

It’s no secret that cleantech venture capital has been hard to come by both because of larger issues in VC fundraising as well as the bankruptcies that dotted 2009-2012. But the perspective is different today in a SolarCity/Tesla world.

While Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s global investment in clean energy figures have been down since a 2011 high of 317 billion to about 251 billion last year, Q3 was up year over year at $55 billion versus $49 billion for new investments being made in clean energy. Overall, 2014 is tracking ahead of 2013, a sign that clean energy investing has stabilized. Q3 also saw a pair of successful solar IPOs in the form of solar project operator TerraForm and rooftop solar installer Vivint, both being helped along by the incredible post IPO performance of SolarCity.

And if hot public markets are driving some of the renewed interest in venture capital, that’s unlikely to change in the next few years. A number of solid IPOs remain on deck—Dropbox, Pinterest, and Airbnb to name a few. While inflated valuations of these startups are likely to create some lackluster post IPO performance, VCs will still benefit from the relative liquidity of public markets and send the signal to LPs allocating that there’s still money to be made in VC. And with the rise of capital light, digital green investing, I expect some of that money will be available for innovations that create resource efficiency.