Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, the venture-capital arm of the bankrupt investment bank, is in late-stage talks to spin off as an independent firm, VentureWire’s Tomio Geron reported Tuesday.

The venture fund is part of Lehman Brothers Holdings, the bank’s investment-management division. Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman agreed Monday to buy most of the businesses within that division. The venture arm, however, chose to remain independent and is in talks with its limited partners and secondary firms to buy out Lehman Brothers’ stake in the fund. It would become a stand-alone venture firm with approximately $800 million in assets.

A partner at Lehman Brothers Venture Partners sent an e-mail message to its portfolio companies and other venture firms, VentureWire reported, and a recipient who asked to remain anonymous forwarded the e-mail to VentureWire.

Lehman’s venture arm was established in 1995 and, according to its Web site, had raised $1.1 billion in committed capital and had invested $717 million in more than 80 companies. Those start-ups include Kayak, the travel search engine; TeleNav, which offers location-based services for mobile devices; and Fluidigm, the biotech that was forced to withdraw its I.P.O. registration last week.

Of course, with the death of Lehman Brothers, its venture fund had no choice but to find new backers or shut itself down. However, other banks with venture funds that are not in such dire straits are also questioning whether they should be in the venture-capital business. That is because of the pressing need for liquidity and the fact that these funds are not core to banks’ business, said David de Weese, a general partner at Paul Capital Partners, which specializes in private-equity secondary investments.

In January 2007, for example, Paul Capital led the spin-out of Bank of America’s venture arm, BA Venture Partners. It became Scale Ventures, a $400 million independent fund.

Banks originally got into the venture-capital business, Mr. de Weese said, in order to drive business underwriting I.P.O.s or facilitating sales when venture-backed companies went public or got sold. “They were endearing themselves to the company to get that business,” he said. With the tight exit markets, that strategy no longer always makes sense.