Back in in 2019 Sunstone started sharing studies of European venture capital funded successes – i.e. M&A transactions. In 2021 we started adding US M&A’s to the data and later the same year we evaluated to which extent an IPO impacted the observations made. Over the following years we looked at various attributes of successful companies and discussed the data both here on LinkedIn and with our colleagues at conferences. Feel free to revisit some of the data here https://lnkd.in/eXbWFrMx
But trends change, and our student assistant Sophie Blomgren-Hansen has kicked off this year with updating the data to end 2025. The figure shows the risk adjusted multiple relative to total raised. Please note that our risk adjusted return is the likely return of the transaction based on the publicly available transaction data and the historic success rates and payouts of structured transactions available from SRS Acquiom. Only transactions with a known total value above EUR 50 million are included. The dataset has close to 250 transactions and the 2025 transactions added are included in yellow. Some of our observation from previous posts were:
-> Multiples decline as you approach EUR 100 million invested. Accordingly, Sunstone is very focused on the first EUR 50 million invested and how, and if, you can achieve transactable milestones
-> Higher return multiples at less invested translates to higher multiples for both pre-clinical and phase 1 milestones – and a high ratio of the transactions (~40%) are achieved already at this stage. Sunstone is an early-stage investor catering to the opportunity to exit on both pre-clinical, phase 1 and phase 2 data.
Although not evident from the figure shown, data has changed over time and in our next post we will share and discuss how multiples and invested capital have changed over the past 15 years. Feel free to guess the trend!?