Molten Ventures Plc

Good morning and welcome to the Malton Ventures PLC full year 23 interim results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged. You can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated in the right-hand corner of your screen. Just click Q&A, scroll to the bottom, type your question and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. Have the company review all questions submitted today. Publish responses where appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Martin Davis, CEO and Ben Wilkinson, CFO. Good morning.

Good morning, Paul, and good morning, everybody. We really appreciate your time. I think this is a really important opportunity for us to engage with our retail shareholders. We think it's very important to be able to communicate with all of our shareholders what's going on in the business, and we see this vehicle as an opportunity for us to get the message out to a broader group. So we really do welcome it, and we very much appreciate your feedback as to what you find valuable and whether you'd like us to communicate in this form more frequently. we are um just on uh voice today but for those of you who want to know what we look like um it's myself and ben wilkinson and myself the ceo and ben uh the cfo and uh we will be giving about a 30-minute presentation uh give or take and then we will open up to questions we're very happy to take whatever questions you may have So these are obviously the interim results halfway through our financial year. And I think the key message here is that the numbers that we announced yesterday very much follow the trading statement issued six weeks ago, as far as the performance, ever so slightly better as far as the numbers go. But we do try to get out the trading numbers as quickly as possible at the end of the period to give investors and shareholders an indication where we are. and then we follow it up with more detailed numbers, the final numbers once they've been audited, and also an opportunity for us to go into a little bit more detail about what we saw in the first half. And so as far as the numbers go, Ben will talk in more detail about that in a few minutes. But as far as the numbers go, the gross fair value reduction of 17% remains, as we said before. It's a net downward movement of 12%, taking into consideration currency headwinds that we explained in our trading statements. Valuations really have come down very much as a result of us calibrating to public market peers. Public markets have been down over the last period, and we have, particularly with our later stage companies, we felt that it's appropriate for us to mark ours down, not quite in line with public market peers, but to reflect the downward movement of public markets. Despite removing 35% from the EV of the core, the fair value reductions for us are obviously much smaller than that and that is really because of the downside protection that we have in our preference share structure and ben will talk a little bit about that uh in a few minutes but i think it is an important part of our model and it's it's important to understand that despite um the risk inherent in these early stage companies that we invest in the reality is we do have the opportunity to go in at a preference high up on the preference stack which does give us down downside of protection The portfolio remains well-funded, 75% of the core with 18 months plus of cash runway. We're working very closely with the portfolio, with portfolio companies to extend that as far as possible, because we do understand the importance of preserving cash in this current environment. Revenues in the core, though, and this is, I think, one of the things that we do get a great deal of comfort from, continue to grow at an impressive rate. And across the core, average for 22, we're nearly at the end of that year, they are growing in excess of 60% and they are forecasting to grow in excess of 70% next year. We're also continuing to build third party assets under management, which is an important part of our strategy, particularly with EIS and VCT strategies, which continue to grow very well. As far as our liquidity and available cash goes, we have a reasonably strong cash position of 28 million. We have, as you know, we completed the debt facility earlier on in the first half, and we have 60 million of that drawn. But we also have over 20 million of listed stock, and that's on the 30th of September market price. There's been a small improvement on those across the board. As far as deployment goes, we have deployed 112 million in the first half, which is all of our investments, and we're still very much targeting for the 150 million at the end of the year. So we do expect a slowdown, and we've seen a slowdown in the second half already, and we do expect that to continue. But the resilience of our numbers today that are smaller than their public market comparators is really because of the resilience that we have in our model. We have a very consistent way of valuing. We haven't changed that. We take a conservative approach to valuations. We have a very broad model. set of companies, over 70 companies across a number of sectors and at different stages of development. And it's that portfolio approach enables us to manage the downside, but also the risk profile. And finally, and very importantly, and we'll talk about this later, I suspect, is we continue to build our ESG, continue our ESG journey. And that is both about us as a business, but also about us helping our portfolio companies to run in more sustainable and high levels of governance model than possibly you would expect from a startup. I'm not going to spend much time on this slide, but I'm conscious that not everybody will be as familiar as others with our model. I think really I'd probably just say a couple of things. The first thing on the top right hand side is that we do have the ability to invest across different stages. We don't do seed. We do that through our funder funds program and we don't do pre IPO. That's really where we can add value by helping our shareholders to get access to pre IPO markets. But where we really operate is in the series A, B and C. And as you can see in the bottom right hand chart, this is where there is substantial growth over a relatively short period of time. and this is where um originally draper spree now molten ventures has been investing for over 20 years and we understand this space very well it has very specific characteristics there are very specific criteria that you need to see in order to win and that's where we've operated and i think the last point i'd say on this is that within that growth stage, when companies are growing that rapidly, when they have the gross margins that we expect to see, our average is over 65% gross margin, the companies very rarely go to zero. They do, because that's life, but the hit rate and the success rate at that stage is much, much better, particularly considering the growth potential within that sector. I think now I will hand over to Ben to talk through the results and maybe talk a little bit about the attribution, about where we've got our results and where the numbers are.

Thank you Martin. Hello everybody. I'll talk us through the headlines of the results first and then we'll go through some slides which give a little bit more detail on the breakdown of how those numbers came together. So just starting with the highlights of the period to the end of 30th of September, we have a gross portfolio value. The gross portfolio is the main measure that we use and it demonstrates the value of all of the assets we have in the portfolio. We take off from that number carry value and deferred taxes that might get paid and then it's a net number that goes on to the balance sheet. So you see and then what is reflected on the balance sheet is the net investments. And it's the net investments that make up the majority of our net assets. And to get from those net investment number to the net asset number, you add on principally the cash and the debt. Those are the main items on the balance sheet. So for this period, we've had a movement down, which we've talked about in the gross portfolio. We have reduced down the values of the companies, principally reflecting those movements that Martin highlighted in the public markets. The assets have moved down, fair value of 17%. The opening gross portfolio was 1.5 billion. And the 17% was offset with currency benefits. A lot of our companies are denominated in dollars or euros, and therefore the weakness in this period has been a benefit to our portfolio value. And that's offset by approximately 5%. And that leads us to this 12% gross portfolio value decrease that you see on the highlights here. cash being invested we have 112 million added to the portfolio value in the period from the investments that we've made and then in a similar way where we've realized investments we have 13 million of cash returning back to the balance sheet but which comes into the cash line. So those are the key movements that we've had from the portfolio perspective that nets down to 1.28 billion of net assets and it's that number that's divided by our number of issued shares which is just under 153 million that gives us then our NAV per share of eight times the And it's that NAV per share, of course, that is therefore reflected in the market and what we reflect our current share price against, which is currently trading at a discount. But that's the headline number that people will use. And that will be the reference point for roughly the next six months until we put out the next iteration of our valuations for the end of March, which captures our full year position. The other highlights that we mentioned here are in relation to our cost base. We always target to have less than 1% of operating costs on a net basis. This is income, less expenses. And for this period, we'll show some charts showing the trends, but we're about 0.1%, so well below that target. And then finally, we've talked about the expanded debt facility. This was something we put in place in the six-month period, a new facility of 150 million. This is broken down between 90 million of term debt, which we've now drawn, and 60 million of a revolving credit facility. And that means that we can repay that debt back and then redraw the debt again. So that stays available to us. And as it stands at this point in time, we haven't drawn that revolving credit facility. So that 60 million is available to us as additional liquidity on top of the 28 million of cash that we have. So just moving along to give you a little bit more detail, it's quite often easier to look at this graphically. The 1.5 billion on the left-hand side is the opening portfolio, as I highlighted. You can then see the addition of cash and the reduction of realized cash, and then the net of those fair value movements that I talked about, the downward movement of 262 million on the fair value being offset by the currency gain of 82 million which gives us that net of 180 and that leaves us with our gross portfolio value of 1.45 and then just showing on the right hand side that progression over time this really demonstrates how we've grown the asset base obviously that's reduced in this period where we've had reductions in the value of the portfolio but you can see the trend over time and how that's been reflected in the NAV per share The next slide is giving a little bit more additional color and detail. The valuations is a key part of what we do, and we're trying to ensure that you as investors and potential investors can see how these valuations are pulled together. Again, starting on the left-hand side of the chart, you have the March position, the addition of the invested cash and the reduction of the realized cash coming out. And then the next bars really break down that 180 million of net fair value movements between the component parts of how we value those businesses. The first is the foreign exchange, which I've already highlighted. movements in currency in the period principally dollars and euros against sterling which we sterling is obviously the currency that we're reporting and then you move into the different components of valuation from the technique of valuing these companies we follow the iped guidelines these are the international private equity venture capital guidelines The best source of evidence for valuing a private company is where they've raised capital with third party investment coming into that business. That will then form the strongest point of evidence for the value of that company. But crucially, what you also have to do is take that last round value and then calibrate the movements in the company from their own performance but also the movements that have been reflected in the market since the round and and you can see here 101 million of movements down is is principally where we've reflected last round values and then taken the market movements for each of those technology subsectors since There is a headline view that NASDAQ moved down roughly 25% in the period between March and the end of September. But we've had some technology subsectors which have moved greater than that. And semiconductors is a good example of that, where that's moved, in fact, in about 45% in that period. And then moving along for the different valuation techniques that we've applied, we've got loss on listed assets. daily traded price we mark those assets like Trustpilot and UiPath and Kazoo to the balance sheet dates that will be reflected with prices as at the 30th of September and then looking at the net loss fair value in assets valued at NAV This is where we have LP positions. So we've invested in a limited partnership. And that's essentially somebody else's fund, a third party manager. And that principally reflects the seed fund of funds where we don't invest directly in those companies. We go through managers that we know across Europe and we've built up a program across Europe of 67 managers now with about 72 million of throng. on a program of 130 million of committed capital. And what we're reflecting here is the movements in value in the period. And this also will capture the early bird assets where an LP in German partnership with early bird across several of their funds. And that gives us access to the German speaking parts of the market in the series A slightly earlier stage, late seed in a series A opportunities. And then just finally to finish on this slide, the last valuation technique that we have is looking at comparison. is purely taking the revenue of the underlying portfolio companies and reflecting them against a previously agreed basket of comparable companies in the public markets and therefore reflecting again a reduction in multiples that we've seen in this period. And so that gives you the summary of the key movements that bring us back to that 1.45 billion on the gross portfolio value.

Thanks, Ben. And just before I go to deployment, I can see the questions coming in. I might just deal with one or two of them as they're relevant. The first one is this question on independent valuations. And our valuations are We follow, as Ben said, he's explained how we do them. They are subject to audit. In fact, we have two independent checks on them, first by the PwC, which is entirely independent, and then the second is our independent PLC board. So we do have two independent reviews of our valuations, ensuring that we're not just marking our own homework and that we are doing exactly as Ben explained in the valuations process. We have considered whether or not we should look for third party complete separate valuations for a small number of our companies if the market feels that that would give them greater comfort. The reality is we know these companies better than anybody third party. And so therefore we're not 100% sure we'll get anything a better result. We do understand that some people think that's better. So it is something we're considering. It's not something we do at the moment. As far as deployment goes, our deployment has remained relatively consistent and exactly as we said, I think as we went into this year, it has slowed significantly. We are expecting to deploy 150 million this year. A lot of that, so we are 112 so far and a few more million between the 31st of September and now. But we are still targeting 150. We think we're fairly confident to hit that number. The mix is not that different from historically, certainly as far as the percentage of primary versus follow-on, which it's relatively standard and consistent. We have probably be deploying as you can see bottom left a little bit more into the slightly earlier stages as the markets got tougher and later stage assets have been probably hit harder by the market comps and so we've seen better deals slightly earlier and so I think you know we've seen a we have seen an increase in that in the first half and we'll see how that develops in the second half But when you look at overall capital deployed, and this is the bottom right hand, and this splits by the various, whether it's primary, follow on, or secondary, with the other categories. If you were to take out last year, which I think we all accept was an exceptional year, then by the year end, we do think that we will be showing a relatively consistent trajectory upwards, consistent and relatively smooth upward movement as the business has scaled. And as I say, I think if you take out last year, which was an exceptional year, then I think we will probably see that that onward trajectory is pretty much consistent, as you'd expect, with the growing shape of the business. I think the only other point on deployment that's worth highlighting is that the percentage of funder funds our seed funder funds program is higher than it has in the past. That is because that program has continued to grow, whereas our overall deployment has slowed right down. And so therefore the percentage is larger. But some of you may remember that we have decided that we would syndicate that program And we are very close to getting our first cornerstone investor into that program. And I think that will help us to manage our flows, but also to be able to grow that program, which is something that's very important for us to be able to spot these early companies at an early stage. As far as our investments go, a glut in April and May, really a bit of a hangover from a relatively busy end of last half of year. It can take anything from three to four months to close deals once we've signed term sheets. And so that's what we might expect. We've obviously slowed right down through the year and that is reflected. There was also a question about the various merits of investing in the PLC versus the VCT. And I'm not going to give anyone financial advice, but obviously they're very different as far as tax treatment. It's the first thing. But I think the other thing is that when you invest in the PLC, you get the whole access to all of our investments. Whereas when you invest in the VCT, there are only VCT qualifying deals, which for a start will always be UK. And secondly, much earlier or generally earlier stages because of the rules. So I think in investing in the PLC, you get the full access to all of our companies, likely to exit earlier probably than the EIS and VCTs, just because they're probably slightly bigger when we invest in them. And so I think that's one of the primary differences, certainly as far as the proposition, the investing proposition. But we do continue to invest in EIS and VCT assets. And as I said, we're expecting deployment to be still relatively flat over the remainder of this quarter. As far as income and cost progression go, those of you who've been on these calls before will be familiar that my view is that we're very keen to build third party income and to constrain our own costs, our overheads, so that we can get to a position where our income exceeds our overheads. And that's a position that we hope to get into. Ben has explained that the traditional measure of operating cost net of fees as a percentage of NAV, which is the grey line, is exceptionally low for this sector. And we see that continuing to get smaller. But certainly by the year end, on the right-hand column, I would hope that that blue line and the pink line are much closer together as we continue to increase fees. and demonstrate cost restraint in our overheads, which I think is very important. Next, I think it's important to talk about returns and also I think Ben maybe will spend some time talking about the resilience and what we mean by the resilience in the portfolio through the preference structure.

Thank you. Next slide that we look to is the track record since IPO. We've shown this in different formats over some previous reporting periods, but here we tried to consolidate it into a few key messages. I think what this demonstrates as a chart and in terms of the logos and the split of returns is very much a traditional venture capital portfolio returns where the returns are skewed to the winners. And you can see on the right hand side where you have three X plus multiples, that's where the majority of our returns proceeds will come from. And it's about 45% of our invested capital. So that demonstrates that those will be the companies that where as they scale and grow, we should be holding onto those businesses to the extent that we can and growing our estates as they scale so that we can maximize our returns. If you look at the other end of the spectrum, where we have had some zeros in the portfolio, that's been about 8% of our invested capital. And also looking at the next bar, less than 1x, it's been about just under 20% of our invested capital with some returns proceeds, but obviously less than the originally invested amount. This is a risk business, and this is therefore important from a model perspective to reflect how those risks are demonstrated. but it's an asset class in its own right, and it demonstrates returns above what have been returned in the public markets. And therefore, because it's a risk business and you can lose money on certain assets, you need to have a broad portfolio of investments. And there's other aspects. I'll talk about preference shares in a moment. That is part of the model of how we demonstrate these returns as well. And I just finally say that in that one to three X bar, that's where a lot of the management time is spent realizing companies which have an inherent value. and have inherent underlying technology, but won't necessarily go on to be the big returners. And therefore, we will work with those companies to find solutions and exits and make sure that we're returning capital back to the balance sheet. So moving on to resilience, it's important, obviously, in the downside. And so we're giving more focus on on this as the market has shifted. I've touched on on the top left hand side, the different methods of valuing the companies. These bars really show you the breakdown of the gross portfolio. from the valuation technique that's been adopted. Just looking at a few of these and picking out some underlying numbers. For the investments we've valued using revenue market multiples, those bars on the right, and 282 million for this period. We've used multiples in a range of just under 1x up to an 11x and the weighted average of those multiples is important just under a 7x multiple and that's a broad range of of businesses in different technology sub-sectors and that's being reflected by the multiples that have been applied looking at the the next bar which is the calibrated last round of investment this this is the largest for the period in terms of value and this is where we take in the last round investments with applied discounts ranging from 4% up to 82%, with a weighted average discount of 27% being applied. And crucially here, looking at the time horizons of the rounds, just under 80% of the of months. So normally those rounds would be relevant markets for valuations for a longer period of time. But given the volatility in the markets, we've moved them away from those round values very quickly. And just on the right hand side, we're demonstrating that if we had taken those last round values, there'd be about 270 million of uplift in value just on that that were completed in the last 12 months. And so we really wanted to demonstrate the level of discount that's been applied into these companies already to reflect where the public markets are trading. And then finally, on the quoted valuations, I've mentioned already that we have those as at the share prices at 30th of September. There has been some small uplifts since that period at end, but the daily traded prices is of course the most relevant for those three companies. So just moving to the next slide, which is a continuation of this resilience point. managing risk in venture capital is the portfolio management approach. Another in our model is the stage of investment. We will invest small amounts of money at the early stage. And then as we see companies develop and progress and de-risk their model, we'll add more capital to grow our equity stake to reach those proof points. Thinking back to that track record side, we're obviously trying to skew our capital towards the winners in the portfolio. But another key feature of the model is how we invest. majority of our businesses 90 plus are benefiting from a preference share and preference shares are a legal right within the shareholder agreements and what that essentially provides us with is downside protection it doesn't limit any upside for us because we can choose to be in the ordinary shares in the event of scaling and growth but in the downside we will retain our preference share right and what that means in practice is just to use a worked example is if we invest let's say 50 million pounds into a business that's valued at a 200 million pound pre-money valuation the value of that business could fall all the way down to 50 million before we start to lose value on our original investment and that's because the preference share instrument where we will be the first money out of that business in the event of a realization and it's therefore because of this as we flex the enterprise values of those businesses in the valuation process we have downside protection such that the enterprise values we've moved on average 35% in the core in this period but the movements we've had in the in the fair value downward trajectory is only 17%, and that's really reflecting where those preference stacks come into value and come into use. The other aspects of resilience that we'll just highlight is liquidity in the portfolio itself. The companies have raised sufficient capital over the last 12 to 18 months, and that's given them enough runway such that over 75% of the core portfolio have 12 months plus of cash runway, and that's expansion plans and a key part of valuation is reflecting the commercial traction in those businesses and that's being reflected here as a summary by their revenue growth and you can see Martin highlighted already greater than 60% growth in calendar year 22 and expected or projected growth of greater than 70% for the following year and just on that top right chart you can see how that breaks down in terms of revenue growth by cohort across the core portfolio This final slide on the portfolio is demonstrating where the valuation movements have fallen by individual company. I won't go through all of them, but we've obviously gone through how it comes together as a summary. The key ones probably to pull out will be things like Graphcore, where the peer group for semiconductors over 40% and we've therefore reflected that in our downward valuation of graphical in our portfolio. And in a similar way, we've seen movements with some of the neobanks and we've reflected that into Revolut's valuation in the period. Those would have been the largest movements by value that we've seen, but we've also seen downward movements in companies like Ledger, again, on comps, and companies like List, which is a fashion marketplace, direct to consumer, which has also suffered from a comparable peer perspective And the one notable uplift, probably to mention the period, is Ivan, which had raised capital in the April-May period by that valuation uplift, significant uplift. We've taken some of that uplift, but still retained some reduction relative to that round, reflecting movements in the market since the round occurred.

Thanks, Ben. I'll talk a little bit about the market. I'm not going to spend much time on this because in many respects, other than the tightness of public markets and therefore the restriction of capital in certain areas, the actual VC market and the tech market itself continues to grow at an impressive pace. The compound annual growth rates are still very impressive. We think those will continue. When you look at the number of deals and the size of deals, it's still a significant increase year on year. And as I said, I come back to what I said earlier on with our deployment. If you take out a slightly exceptional year last year, then I think what it shows is the trajectory for European VC is still consistently upwards and an interesting place to invest. It is still only 40%, less than 40% size of the US market. It's growing faster, the returns are better. And so therefore, European VC is still a very, very interesting space. And we still see a lot of activity. And we are still very confident that despite some of the macroeconomic and some of the geopolitical issues, that have affected the economies, the opportunity within European VC, we still think is both considerable and exciting. As far as the tech businesses, and I know that there are a number of different ways you can view tech. People look at the big tech plans and they obviously are in a different space. And then they take a look at innovation generally. And certainly at the early stages, there is a lot more pressure. But where we're operating, the companies that we're investing in continue to make the changes that people need and to apply technology but principally to enterprises but also to how we live and how we work and how we build products and services and we don't see that changing but the interesting thing is if you look at the last two downturns whether that's dot-com boom and bust or the global financial crisis tech and innovation has created large substantial long-term winners and we see no reason to believe that this won't be the case this time around. We do think there'll be some fragmentation from some of the larger players that will throw out a lot of youngsters and a lot of people who potentially are very entrepreneurial who will then get funded for the best businesses and then will grow those businesses. quite often it takes a very sharp shock and a very tough environment for the best businesses to really flourish. And we believe that there's every likelihood that when we come out of this COVID directed downturn, that winners will be identified and winners will be created. And clearly our model is to make sure that we continue to stay in the market and that we continue to be able to identify those potential winners. So as far as outlook goes, for the second half of the year, we don't see any dramatic change to the level of uncertainty, macroeconomic factors, the geopolitical tensions that we're seeing across Europe. We don't think those are going to change significantly before our year end, so the 31st of March. However, we would hope by the end of next calendar year that we do start to see some improvement in certainly the stability of the environment. We do believe that we will remain on track for 150 million of deployment. And that really reflects where we are. And we are preserving capital, both in our own overheads, but also in how we deploy capital. And we do think that we're continuing to look for realizations. And we do think that there will be an uplift in realizations in the second half from the first half. We don't see potentially that there'll be many IPOs. There certainly won't be before the 31st of March. But we are hoping the IPO market will come back next year, calendar year at some stage. But certainly the M&A market should come back next year. And 70% of our exits historically have been through trade sales. So we do think there will be opportunities for us to look for realizations. We're going to be continuing to focus very closely with the portfolio, help them to extend their cash runway, but also make sure they don't inhibit their ability to grow because keeping those growth rates up is absolutely critical to our model. We'll continue to build third party assets and income. And I think most importantly, we're still in the market. We're still out there looking for the best companies to invest. We are being slightly more cautious. We are being slightly more judicious about targets. We are looking at the route to profitability for these companies, but they are early stage companies. And I think we have to accept that, as Ben said earlier on, there is risk in this business, but our job is to make sure that we use our capital in the most risk adjusted approach that we can. It is a portfolio play. It is across the whole portfolio that we think we can add value and deliver returns. And so I think it is important for all of our investors to understand that we may have one or two companies that don't do well, But as long as the majority of our companies are well run, they have good cash, they're showing traction in the critical proof points for the growth of the business, then they will turn out to be good companies and we will be able to deliver good returns. So we're very confident that high growth tech companies will continue to flourish in the current environment. What these tech companies are doing, the solutions they're providing predominantly to enterprises around reducing costs, reducing risk, improving ability to deliver and develop products. All of those solutions are as relevant now as they've ever been. And the technological advances we've seen over the last five years continue to move very rapidly. And so therefore, we're very excited about the prospect of tech and about European tech. And we're also very excited about the prospect of the portfolio, despite operating in a very difficult environment. So that was the presentation. I know we've got some questions. Probably, should I hand back to you, Paul, or should I go straight to you?

That's fantastic. Look, thank you very much indeed to you both for the presentation. As Martin said, we've had a number of questions through, and do please continue to submit those questions via the Q&A tab on the right-hand corner of the screen. But just for the team, take a few moments to review those questions today. I'd like to remind you the recording of the presentation, along with a copy of the slides in the published Q&A, can be accessed via our investor dashboard on the InvestorMeet company platform. Martin, as you say, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. If I could just ask you to click on that Q&A tab. More appropriate to do so, if you could just read out the question and give your response, and I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you.

Okay, so the first question is, what exactly is the structure of the company? Is it an LP in the various funds? How is it structured to participate in the returns from the fund? So very simply, we're a PLC, we're a balance sheet. We invest our own money. Our only third-party money we invest at the moment in any scale are the EIS and VCT. um but we are looking to build new funds where we there will be a traditional gplp relationship and that is for example the fund of funds that we're syndicating that will be that gplp type relationship so uh predominantly it's the plc it's the balance sheet money that we are investing in and the only third-party money that we're investing in any scale at the moment is the eisvct i do think that will change as we start to launch new funds and build in terms of sources of income I think the next question is quite an interesting one. How do valuations for new deals that you're working on compare with those 12 to 18 months ago? Well, I think there are a number of questions. I think the first one is how do valuations, while the valuations are smaller, certainly than 12 months ago, I think some of the Some of the founders have got the memo about the world's changed. Some of them haven't. So we are still seeing some very hot companies with very high valuations. And obviously, we're we're avoiding those. But the reality is that the valuations are much more realistic now than they were 12 to 18 months ago. We've talked about the cadence. Funny enough, it's partly because of of lower inflows from exits, but also partly because we're just being more cautious in this environment. In an environment where it's hard to know what the cost of capital is going to be two to three years down the line, you've got to be very careful on your valuations. Your in price is very important. So part of it is about not about exits dropping, but I would say it's more about us just being much more cautious about where we invest in. And I don't think we're feeling frustrated about missing good deals for the lack of funds. Every week we go through with our whole investment team, all of the European deals every week that have been done. We identify whether we've seen them. and whether we'd and or whether we'd miss them. And there are very few that we look at and say, really wish we'd got into that. And it isn't because of lack of funds.

I think it's worth adding, isn't it, that the current market that we see there is a cautiousness that's applied across the whole of the VC market at the moment. And so you'll see tier one companies getting funded and a lot of capital going to those, but a lot more cautious approach to new deals across the sector. But also from a valuation perspective that you'll find new deals will be a function of how much capital is raised. And therefore part of that caution is reflecting the cost of capital and people are investing less and companies are raising less because they're being a lot more capital efficient.

Edison Report, do you want the next Edison Report out?

I believe the next Edison Report should be out in the coming weeks. They're just doing a refresh on the back of the interim results.

I think we've dealt with the difference between investing in the shares between the PLC and VCT. Load Facility. Yes, I touched on the loan facility. Sorry, I should read the question. Loan facility seems to contain a covenant regarding gross portfolio value and references creditors' ability to do quarterly independent portfolio valuations. If there is still a degree of overconfidence in the valuations, e.g. fortune, revenue, does this not create a vulnerability? Is the covenant based on the creditors' valuation or is it dependent on the results delivered by the company?

Because a few things within that, as an overall point on the loan, we had a loan facility in place that was 65 million revolving credit facility. We brought that in initially when the balance sheet was around 500 million. So we've always tried to keep the loan facility actually around 10% loan to value. The new 150 million facility is just extending the existing arrangements. From a site perspective, we put JP Morgan in as the lead lender in this facility. facility, but that's still very much keeping it at 10% of loan to value. And therefore the value of the portfolio is indicative of where the loan has been set and where we can raise. In terms of independent valuations, the lenders do have a right to get an independent valuation every We had one at the outset of the loan facility. That was a feature of the previous facility as well. And that's something we've worked with for the last few years. And we haven't found any major discrepancies between the independent valuations and our own. But that's a process that once we've submitted we have done now, then the lenders take our valuations at the next mark on the portfolio. It's only really where there's a significant potential discrepancy that they will ask for that independent valuation. But as I say, it's something we've been through many times before, and it's seen as an important test for us in terms of another reference point to where we value the companies. And quite frankly, we welcome that because it's a broad market and it's helpful to see different points of input.

Yeah, thanks. So again, the point to take away from that for those that are the previous question as well about independent valuations, we went through a full independent, entirely independent valuation in March, and then another one at the end of the loan facility process. So we have had two this year, fully independent valuations in relation to getting the debt facility

set up um the next question is then um uh what potential portfolio is valid using last funding around i think we've covered that i think we've covered that there's a sort of 904 million i think it was uh last round but that's last round calibrated to the market so it's not taking the last round price it's actually moving that and taking those discounts that we've acquired with an average of 27

So next question is, what is the main differences between the business model of Molten Ventures and IP Group? Do you call IP Group as a competitor? I don't really think we see them as a direct competitor. They invest in a slightly different way, obviously from the outputs, predominantly from universities, and obviously they have significant third party assets. But we don't really see them in our deals.

No, it tends to be that they're university spin-ups, so they go much earlier than we will. So we'll come into deals later. We've had very few cross-investments. We've had some. And they will often go for more hardware-focused or healthcare-focused than we will. So our portfolio is very much focused on technology, later-stage technology, than they will go. So we don't tend to see them in deals as a competitor.

So the next question is around headcount reductions. Can you please comment on the extent of cost optimization measures, EIA headcount reduction, across your core portfolio? I think the thing to bear in mind is the core portfolio tends to be later stage companies. They tend to be larger companies, and therefore they've gone through a number of years of growth, and there's always facts in companies that grow very rapidly over a period of time. And so I think pretty much all of our core companies have taken some headcount measures. They've all taken... I don't think we can say consistently, there isn't really any consistency because there's such a variety, but generally with the larger companies where they've got large cost bases, they have been taking out costs as you would expect, because if they're not making profit, then if they don't take out costs, then they're just gonna have to come back to market quicker to raise. But it has been significant and we've been working very closely But most of the core companies, we don't have a great deal of influence. They tend to be a bit away from us. When Ben talked about the returns, the mid-range companies, they're the ones we're talking to most. And that's where we've had a most direct impact and where we're helping them to drive cost optimization where they need to. The next question is proportion of gross portfolio value is made up of the par value of your preference shareholdings, I think Ben mentioned.

I think we have a bullet on one of the slides which points to about 90% of our companies having the preference share stats in their structure and about 45% of those have been utilised in this valuation period.

next question if you feel so confident about the underlying value of the portfolio what will make you consider some kind of buyback i think a realization of 150 million pounds would probably um most certainly lead us to to do a buyback look we are very we're very confident in the value of the portfolio and we believe there is a value gap we would definitely buy back if we had excess cash we are um you don't You don't raise debt to buy your own stock, clearly. And so right now it's not appropriate for us, but we would definitely do a buyback at this price. Indeed, we would have loved to two or three weeks ago, and we still would at this price. But it is about capital. and liquidity we need to keep enough liquidity to make sure that we can support the portfolio and preserve the value in the portfolio and so at this stage where we are right now sadly it is not an option but the next question can you buy your own shares absolutely we can and we would and indeed ben and myself certainly personally have been um and i think we as i said that that's a matter of uh capital for the for the business How do you get access to the fund of funds offering? I think this might be how does an individual get access to the fund of fund offering?

I think I think it may know who I to syndicate that out to institutions for large checks and so there'll be sort of a minimum check size in the sort of three to five million range but yeah it's something that is available but it's probably not appropriate for most of the retail investors on this call I imagine but if people feel that's different then please contact us.

The next question, when you talk about portfolio companies like Graphcore and Riverlane, whose output is extremely specialised and complex, how do you evaluate their approaches and chances of success as non-experts? Really good question. We've got a mix of skills and expertise in our portfolio group. We do have some technology experts, certainly in healthcare. Inga Dicken, who runs our, she's our healthcare lead. She's a doctor. So we do have some specialisms, but the reality is that we're investing in people and models and momentum in most cases. And if we need to do some form of technical due diligence, then we will do that. Our view generally is the best possible form of due diligence, certainly in an enterprise software market, is large, sophisticated customers buying in scale. And so, for example, with Thought Machine, when we invested in that company, they were just about to sign Lloyds Banking Group. uh standard chartered and seb um it's a cloud-sourced retail core banking system you know we understand how it works but for us the greatest due diligence was that lawrence banking group were going to sign a multi-year contract as they did and so for us really by the stage we come in most of our the technology the technology risk is probably relatively small because they've already hit certain proof points and already starting to accelerate So that tends to be the case. But certainly in Graphcore and Chips and Riverlane, when it comes to quantum, our view with Riverlane and quantum is that we have an expert who has a thesis around how the quantum market will develop, around applications, around operating systems, around hardware. And then we look for the businesses that are going to operate in those particular areas. Whether it works or not, then we'll either outsource that or use customer due diligence to prove the technology. The next question is, are there any subsectors you are particularly keen on at the moment? I think for us, when we look at our portfolio, we have a group of companies that have certain things in common. It isn't a particular sector or subsector. It's because they've got good entrepreneurs, they're in very large addressable markets, European-based. It's because they are doing something that no one else is doing. It's because they have very high gross margins. They've hit certain proof points. It's those sorts of things rather than a particular sector that we are particularly keen on. So I wouldn't say there's any one sub sector. We are quite heavy in fintech right now. I think that's just the nature of the way things have been. We've done a lot of deals on the continent last year. I think that's just the nature of the opportunities we saw. So I don't think there is any particular subsector. Look, there are some that we stay clear of. We're not into medical devices. We are wary of marketplace opportunities now, heavily consumer driven, as you might expect. We stay away from anything related to weaponry or anything like that from the ESG perspective. So I think there are more subsectors that we steer clear of rather than ones that we are particularly keen on. And I think that's the best way to answer it. I could spend an hour talking about the particular things we're excited about at the moment, but I'm not sure that was the question and all we can do yet at the time. So the next question, which I think is the last one, would Molten look to an investment in a disruptive tech platform at seed phase for less than 250K investment? No, we would not be looking at that necessarily, but we would definitely, we get a lot of those through seed, late seed, and we would direct them towards one of our seed funder funds. So I think those are all the questions. I think that's it.

Fantastic. Martin, Ben, thank you for addressing every single question we've had through. So thank you for that. And thank you to all the investors for submitting those. And of course, any further questions that do come through, the team will have the opportunity to review those and we'll publish responses where appropriate to do so. Martin, just before redirecting investors to provide you their feedback, which I know is particularly important to you and the team, can I just ask you just for a few closing comments, please?

Yeah, thank you very much. And thank you for those who have who have dialed in. We do think it's very important for us to be able to reach out to all of our investors. And we see this platform as an opportunity to do that. So thank you for coming and dialing in. And also thank you very much for the platform for providing us with this opportunity. as far as the key messages that i think it's um that i hope you will take away from this call uh the first one is that we have seen um nab reduction um but it but but that does more reflect market peers and market confidence than our own direct portfolio the portfolio is stable It's well funded and continues to grow very nicely. And we have sufficient funds in the PLC to take us through the end of this financial year and to be able to support those portfolio companies. As far as looking forward, we will continue to preserve capital, our own cash, and also those helping our portfolios to extend their runways. We will continue to build AUM and build third-party assets and to build income, which we think is important for us to be able to do to become a more stable and income-generating business. But I think most critically is that the opportunity to invest in tech across Europe is as important now as it has ever been. And the technological advances continue and the benefits that our portfolio companies and other startups and other early stage growth companies are bringing to enterprises to help them to deal with the new economic reality is absolutely there. So we're very excited about the proposition and the prospect and our markets, but we are also putting a cautious tone because we are in very uncertain times. So thank you all very much for your time. And again, thank you very much for InvestorMeet for providing the platform for our session today.

Fantastic. Martin, Ben, thank you indeed for updating investors today. Claire, please ask investors not to close the session as you'll be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it's greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Moulton Ventures PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That concludes today's session. Thank you and good morning to you.