Late-stage tech startups are getting funded at a rate not seen since the late 90s during the dot-com bubble. According to a recent Bloomberg article, hedge funds and mutual funds are dumping money in to the tech arena and they are paying 15 to 18 times the projected sales for the next 12 months. Just five years ago, these same types of deals were looking at drawing 10 to 12 times sales for the next year.

The interest from mutual funds and hedge funds can be partially attributed to recent successes such as Alibaba. When Silver Lake Management LLC made a $3.2 billion paper profit in just three years by backing the Chinese e-commerce giant, the rest of the hedge fund world took notice. With the competition for inclusion in IPO offerings intensifying, mutual funds and hedge funds are participating in pre-IPO funding in an effort to secure blocks of shares once the companies go public.

As with most anything, when the demand increases dramatically, the price is bound to soar as well. According to PitchBook Data, a Seattle based research firm, investors poured $59 billion into U.S. startups last year and that is the most since the dot-com era. There were a record 62 companies raising funds to the point that their valuation was over $1 billion. That is almost three times the number of companies garnering such a high valuation in 2013.