Your company was revalued this quarter, and nobody told you

Ask a founder what their company is worth and they will tell you the price of their last round.

It is the number on the announcement. It is the number in the board pack. It is the number they carry around in their head, unchanged, until the next round moves it.

There is a problem with that. Somewhere in an office you have never visited, someone has already changed it.

And not just once. At every reporting date since the money landed, one or more of your investors has arrived at a fresh number for your company and sent it to people you have never met. You were not consulted. You were not told. In most cases you have no right to be.

This is not some subversive move by your investors. It is an accounting obligation and it is entirely routine. But it produces an asymmetry founders rarely think about. The people on the other side of your next negotiation have been quietly forming and recording a view of your value since the last round. You have been working from a figure you put out in a press release.

This critical metric, nearly always kept secret, is what conditions investor behaviour as the company progresses.

The number nobody asked you about

Private funds must constantly re-assess asset values within their portfolios. They report to their own investors, the limited partners, at fair value, and the framework the industry uses to get there is the IPEV Valuation Guidelines. Nothing in law compels a fund to follow them, but almost everything else does: Invest Europe endorsed them in 2023 and built them into its professional standards, UK Private Capital endorses them, fund agreements specify them and auditors expect them.

These industry guidelines are under regular review. The 2025 edition took effect for reporting periods beginning on or after 1 April 2026, so the version governing how you are being valued this quarter is just four months old.

You can see how these work in practice because a few British investors are listed and report in public. Molten Ventures VCT states that its methodology is in line with IPEV guidance. Augmentum Fintech says the same in its annual report. UK investors, UK companies, describing in public a process most of your own shareholders run in private.

Silence is not stability

The mechanism that catches founders out has a name: calibration.

The price you raised at is treated as an anchor, not an answer. The 2025 edition recasts that price as a calibration point rather than a valuation technique in its own right, and requires the calibration to be evidenced at every reporting date. KPMG puts the consequence plainly: fair value should evolve between measurement dates, because performance and market conditions evolve, and assumptions that stay unchanged should be the exception.

Read that as a founder. The period in which you raised nothing, announced nothing and heard nothing was not a stretch in which your valuation stood still. It was a run of reporting dates at which somebody re-derived it and wrote down why.

So the gap between rounds is not a pause. It is the time in which your number drifts away from the one you announced, in a direction you cannot see, on evidence you did not choose to supply.

There is no single number

Founders may therefore assume that their investors share a view of what the company is worth. Unfortunately, they do not.

One well-known international investor in venture funds collected marks from more than thirty firms and found managers holding companies at an average 23% discount to the last round price. The same later-stage company was carried by one manager at a 26% discount and by another at 40%. The most conservative averaged 41%. Newer funds marked closest to the last round, while longer-established firms applied the deeper cuts. Managers in the United States and Europe behaved much the same way.

So when your current investors set a target price for your next round, they are not starting from one number. They are starting from three or four, none of which is the one you announced. They will rarely reveal these numbers, but the lowest is often held by the most experienced voice in the room.

And a further word of caution here. The mark is on their preference shares, not on your ordinary shares, and those are different instruments with different claims. The 2025 edition expanded its guidance on complex capital structures and on the importance of valuing liquidation preferences. Whatever your investors think the company is worth, what your own shares are worth is a further question, answered further down the stack.

What moves the number is you, and strangers

Two forces move a mark, and only one of them is down to you.

The first is your own progress against your business plan. Molten Ventures VCT states that its approach takes careful note of commercial performance and is cautious, taking write-downs at an early stage. In the year to 31 March 2026 it reported that its holdings largely maintained their valuations, with one exception, written down for delayed progress. No financing round. No exit. No crisis. A milestone slipped and the number moved. The year before, a market shift from growth towards profitability produced a £3.1m decline in Thought Machine alone, one of the trust's larger holdings, against net assets that stood at £114m the following year end.

For a DeepTech founder that is the sentence to reflect on. The board update in which you explained why the pilot line is a quarter late was not only a conversation. It was an input.

The second force has nothing to do with you. Augmentum reported that across its portfolio in the year to March 2025, falling multiples at publicly traded comparables took £15.2m off its valuations, with public comparables used for 78% of the portfolio. Listed businesses you have never heard of were re-rated, and your book value fell with them.

Part of your number is a report card. Part of it is the weather.

Which side of the book you are on

The mark records something more consequential than just a price. It records a ranking.

In its year to 31 March 2026, Molten Ventures plc saw its core portfolio deliver 26% fair value growth while its emerging portfolio was written down by 21%. One manager, one market, one year, and a forty-seven point gap between the companies being backed and the companies being carried.

That gap is not a market observation. It is a set of judgements about individual businesses, made one at a time, and committed to paper long before anything is said aloud.

The mark does not automatically determine follow-on capital allocation. But the judgement that produces it is the same judgement that governs whether capital is reserved for your next round, and the mark is the earliest written record of that judgement. By the time your investors tell you they will not be participating in the next round, that view is not new. It has been on file for quarters.

The price the market puts on the number

So how far should any of this be trusted?

Listed vehicles give you the outside world's verdict, and it is not one verdict. Molten's discount to net asset value stood at 36% in December 2025 and had narrowed to 29% by June 2026. Augmentum's shares sat at a 45% discount on 30 September 2025, its board having already acknowledged that shareholders can be sceptical of private valuations because they cannot be verified the way public equities can. Yet Seraphim Space traded at a 33.6% premium on 27 April 2026.

Even so, listed venture vehicles are rare, and most of your shareholders will never publish anything. The scrutiny does not disappear. It simply happens privately, one limited partner at a time.

Consider the position of an investor carrying you at or near your last round price who suspects the market would now pay less. Any priced round sets a new number, and a lower one forces the write-down they have so far avoided. The way to raise money without setting a price is not to set one. So the preference tends to surface as enthusiasm for a convertible instrument, or a bridge from existing shareholders, or a gentle suggestion that you extend runway and go out later. Each of those may be excellent advice on its merits. Each also happens to protect a book value. Both things can be true at once, and it is worth knowing that when the suggestion arrives.

Keeping a watching brief on this key metric

You will likely never see the number. That is not the same as being unable to sense where it sits.

Founders who have been through several rounds tend to work on this quietly, over quarters rather than weeks. They build a relationship with their larger shareholders solid enough to carry an unforced conversation about their book value, and they revisit that conversation from time to time, well before any funding event.

When did you last revise your view of our value, and what moved it? Are we close to the last round price, or some way below? Is capital reserved for our next round, and against what assumptions?

None of those is a rude question. An investor who bristles at all three has told you something.

An open discussion about book value is the ultimate test of how open the relationship really is. The answer is not simply a measure of what your company is thought to be worth on a given day. It is a proxy for the health of the relationship you will be carrying into your next round.

 
Let's talk.