What the PA Mark is
An indicative valuation: our best current estimate of what a private company is worth, dated to the day it was computed, together with the signal that set it and the last priced round it is measured against. It is not a quote, not an offer, and not the price any particular transaction will clear at — it is where the evidence points.
Each mark names its own basis. Every company page says what set today’s number, what confirmed it, and how far it has moved since the round.
The waterfall
Different signals answer different questions. A funding round says what a company was worth on a date. A secondary market price says where it is trading now. Prints say where it actually cleared. Fund marks say what careful institutions think. Averaging them together produces a number that is true of nothing.
So we don’t average. We take them in order, and the first one that qualifies sets the price:
- 1Secondary market price — A secondary-market price updated within the last 14 days. Continuous and current, so it goes first.
- 2Secondary prints — Three or more completed transactions in the last 90 days; their median sets the price. One or two prints never set or move the mark — they are noted, not obeyed.
- 3Institutional fund marks — The newest reporting cluster of fair-value marks that SEC-registered funds disclose in N-PORT filings, taken as a median.
- 4The last priced round — Nothing has traded since, so the round is the price, carried with its date. It never decays and is never withheld for age.
- 5Last reported valuation — No round with a post-money on record. Published as a dated reported valuation, not as a mark.
Everything below the step that set the price is a confirmation, not an input. Nothing is blended against stale data.
From a price to a valuation
Where a live secondary market price exists, the market’s own valuation is the valuation: the price multiplied by the market’s share estimate, as the market publishes it. The move against the last round’s post-money is then stated as the market’s premium or discount to that round.
For every other company the round’s post-money is the level and the move since the round is the ratio. The valuation is the post-money multiplied by the price now divided by the price of that same source on the round date.
Because it is a ratio, no share count is assumed and no share count is needed — which is why it works for every company on the record and not only the ones that quote a secondary price. The baseline is always read on or after the round date: a reading from before it prices the old regime and would count the round’s step-up twice.
A price per share is published only where a live secondary market price exists. Nobody quotes a share price for the rest, so neither do we; those names carry a valuation and their reference round instead.
Confidence
Confidence describes agreement between independent signals, not how recent the number is.
- ·HIGH — Two other kinds of signal confirm the price within 15%, at comparable dates.
- ·MEDIUM — One confirmation — or a round in the last twelve months with nothing since.
- ·LOW — A single signal, or a round older than twelve months with nothing since.
What we ignore
A priced round resets the regime: signals from before the latest round are obsolete and are dropped at every step. Market readings older than about a year are dropped too.
Two guards catch bad data. When funds reporting the same period disagree by more than 30%, they are marking different share classes or different units, and their median sets nothing. When prints or fund marks alone imply a move of more than three times up or down with nothing agreeing, that is a units change rather than a repricing, and the mark holds at its reference.
Companies with no qualifying signal at all get no mark. We’d rather show an honest gap than a confident guess.
Important disclosures
PA Marks are informational estimates, not investment advice, valuations for accounting purposes, or offers to transact. Private-market pricing data is inherently incomplete: transactions we haven’t recorded don’t influence the mark, structures (SPV, forward) can price differently from direct transfers, and different share classes command different prices. Verify independently before relying on any figure.