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With bubble-era venture funds getting ripe on the vine, more firms are looking to unload them to secondary firms.

Early-stage French venture firm Innovacom Gestion is the latest to do so, selling its stakes in 10 companies to Saints Capital for about $50 million.

Many venture firms have funds from 1998 to 2001 that need to be wrapped up by their 10-year timeframe. With the current weakness of both merger-and-acquisition and IPO opportunities making traditional venture exits difficult in the near term, some portfolio companies from the aging funds are still waiting for an exit - and limited partners are waiting for returns.

“If you go back to funds that are 10 years old now, you have essentially one in four companies that are still illiquid today,” said Ken Sawyer, managing director of Saints Capital.

The average time to liquidity for venture-backed start-ups used to be about four and a half years, but today is about seven, and in a couple of years likely will be closer to nine, Sawyer said. This makes the work of secondary firms more common in the industry.

Saints is buying out all of Innovacom’s interests in Actelis Networks Inc., Air2Web Inc., Aperto Networks Inc., Envivio Inc., Kirusa Inc., KXEN Inc., Netasq, Selligent SA and Xtime Inc., as well as a partial share of Witbe.Net.

Most of these are later-stage companies that were founded in the late 1990s. They cover Innovacom’s late-1990s focus in telecommunications equipment, semiconductors and software.