Startup and Scaleup Valuation: How Do Investors Price a Dream?

Innovative startups are newly formed companies with no operating history and no history of profits, yet they possess high-growth potential. They typically absorb significant liquidity in their early years to finance development, often against minimal collateralizable assets. This is unattractive to traditional banking intermediaries, who are often replaced by other specialized intermediaries, such as venture capital or private equity funds, which diversify their portfolios by basing their strategies on multi-year exits with substantial expected increases in value from investments that survive the Darwinian selection process. The evaluation of the target companies follows traditional methodologies, with specific features derived from varied probabilistic scenarios and multiple exit methods. The technological footprint entails evaluating analogies with patents, know-how, and intangibles specific to sectors (e.g., biomedical, internet).