Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review the questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to CEO Ben Wilkinson. Good morning to you, sir.
Good morning. Good morning to everybody on the call. Thank you for joining us. This is a good opportunity for us to present Molten Ventures' annual results. This is for the year ending 31st of March 2025. What we'll go through today is an overview of the business, and Andy will take us through some specifics on the financials for the year. As we're introduced, Ben Wilkinson, CEO of Molten Ventures, and joined by Andrew Zimmerman, our CFO. Starting with an overview of the period, a key feature of this year has been the realizations in the portfolio. We targeted GBP 100 million of realizations last year, and what we've delivered is ahead of that, GBP 135 million, so we've exceeded that target. What that really proves for us is three components.
The first being that when we're selling businesses at the valuations above or equal to our holding value, that these companies are proving the NAV and proving the valuation marks. What it also demonstrates is the portfolio management quality that we have at Molten Ventures. We have a team with deep experience, and the ability to turn these companies to cash at the appropriate time is a good measure of that. Finally, what it proves is our ability to drive liquidity back to the balance sheet. Having an evergreen balance sheet allows us to realize companies, bring that capital back into the balance sheet, and then enables us to enact our capital allocation policy.
That enhanced liquidity position can be put to work with the three pillars of our policy, one being new investments for vintage creation, and we'll touch on that and the importance of that in a bit more detail. The second being into secondary opportunities where the market has a liquidity discount on attractive mature assets because of the lack of liquidity in private markets, and there's pockets of opportunity or windows of opportunity to undertake those secondaries at attractive prices. The final component is buying back our shares, and we've begun a share buyback program in 2024, which we've expanded into 2025, and that's continued over this period end. We'll talk a little more about that program as well. The importance of realizations has been a key feature of the year, but also the ability to demonstrate the robustness of our portfolio.
We have a portfolio of companies with different maturities and different subsectors of technology being addressed, and that strength of that portfolio is what we will come into a bit more detail on here. Some highlights for you in the core portfolio, which is the top 17 companies that represent 61% of the portfolio value, we are now seeing average revenues of $400 million. That really speaks to the maturity of these businesses. The fair value uplift in the period is GBP 72 million. Andy will take us through the details and the movements that have contributed to achieve that. We will put a bit more detail onto the emerging portfolio, which are those companies that sit outside of the core, and we will try and shine a bit more of a light on their growth, which is over 100% in those top 15 emerging companies.
Through the year, we also had a change with myself moving up to the CEO position and Andy joining as, moving up rather, as CFO. What that allowed us to do was have a point of reflection and an assessment of the business, and we have outlined in February some clear strategic priorities for how we are going to take the company forward and navigate the current market. I will just touch on those priorities very briefly, and then we will hand to Andy to go through some of the specifics of the financial results for the year. Touched on it already to some extent, but enhancing shareholder returns, recognizing the share price is trading at a significant discount to the value of the assets, is a clear focus for us.
We believe that to address that, we have to have a strong, robust balance sheet that's clearly proven by the realizations that are coming back, but also our capital structure where we have debt availability as well of GBP 60 million in an undrawn revolving credit facility. That strength of the balance sheet is really allowing us to think about the capital allocation decisions and making sure that we can put some money to work into buybacks. We have set a minimum of 10% of realizations we're going to buybacks, and we're currently operating ahead of that currently. When we have new realizations in the year, as a board, we'll assess where we are, where the discounts are, and where the investment opportunities exist.
Everything we do is around creating value for the shareholders and thinking around how we can ensure that future value is created alongside short-term narrowing of the share price to the NAV. To focus on value creation in the investment side of the market, excuse me, I've focused our team on the Series A and Series B stage of investing. The reason for doing that is that's where we have our core strengths as an organization and as a group. That's where I feel that the balance of risk versus upside reward is the most keenly felt, but it's also where, particularly in the Series B early growth stage part of the market, there is a gap to capital in the European ecosystem.
I feel our ability to create value there, add value to the companies that we invest into, is most acute at that point in the market. We will continue to focus very strongly there and not move perhaps into those earlier stages in the market where the skill sets of investing are distinct. We have invested in funder funds, and over the last seven years, we have built up a program in that seed fund market where we have been an investor into those funds. We feel that is the right way to address that part of the market rather than spending too much capital going directly into those businesses. However, I want to narrow that cohort of managers down.
The first iteration of that program was naturally quite broad because it gave us a breadth across Europe into different pockets of the market, but also different geographies in the market. Going forward, I think that can be a narrower cohort, so the capital will be more focused on our direct investments, but also into the capital allocation policy as we've described. Closely managing and developing the portfolio is embedded in what we do and ensuring we have the resources and the focus to continue to do that. As I say, I think the delivery of those realizations is a demonstration of that portfolio management ability, but also supporting the companies to grow and scale and ensuring that those companies with the best opportunities get the support they need to achieve those goals.
With that, we consider that we have already in the PLC, the public vehicle, a GBP 1.2 billion net asset value. We have a mature portfolio that we can turn to cash over the coming years, and therefore we have the benefit of effectively being our own limited partner investor into new opportunities. The scale of the market and the scale of the market opportunity is such that we'd still like to bring additional co-investment capital alongside that PLC pool of capital to invest. The way that we'll look to do that is building out at the Series B stage where the growth investment ticket size is around GBP 20 million as a lead investor. To create a portfolio at that stage, you need a depth of capital.
Recognizing we will not be raising additional capital at the PLC level, particularly with the discounts that we are trading at, bringing in co-investment pools of funds alongside the PLC is a sensible way for us to grow, but also to ensure that the PLC shareholder gets access to the best deal flow in the European ecosystem by having the right depth of capital and the consistency of investing over time. Those are our key priorities that we have outlined. We are delivering on those, and I will switch over to Andy to take us through some of the results for the year that touch on these.
Thanks, Ben. Good morning, everyone. I'm Andrew Zimmermann. When I presented the interim results with Ben in October 2024, I was interim CFO. I'm now pleased to present our annual results for the year to 31st of March 2025 as CFO. We'll come on to financial performance first. The portfolio has delivered a fair value uplift in the year. It's generated strong realization proceeds and enhanced NAV per share returns with the buybacks while maintaining investment into our exciting portfolio and supporting a robust balance sheet. Total gross portfolio value, fair value growth, excluding FX, was 5% or GBP 72 million, and that was comprised of GBP 180 million of valuation uplifts, net of GBP 108 million of valuation reductions. This overall fair value uplift was, however, partially offset by some adverse FX headwinds, primarily driven by euro exposure of GBP 22 million.
In terms of the valuations, market-leading companies still command a premium when raising capital, but there has been some softening of technology sector public company multiples, which has reduced some of our portfolio company valuations in the period. Our GPV ended the year at GBP 1.4 billion and our NAV at GBP 1.2 billion, both very slightly down in 2024 despite the net fair value uplift. This was primarily because of the strong realizations in the period exceeding the cadence of investments, with deployment of some of those realization proceeds flowing out as share buybacks rather than into new investments. As we've mentioned, realizations in the period totaled GBP 135 million, far exceeding the GBP 100 million guidance that we set last year and included exits from M-Files, Endomag, Perkbox, Graphcore, and a small partial realization of Revolut in a secondary deal led by Revolut.
It is also worth highlighting again that all of these exits were at or above our holding value, which provides further proof points of our robust valuation process and the underlying value of the portfolio. During the year, we invested GBP 73 million into our portfolio, and I will come on to that in a bit more detail shortly. We also completed more than GBP 15 million of share buybacks in the financial year and began a further GBP 15 million program in March 2025, recognizing that the current discount level between our share price and NAV makes buying our own shares an attractive value-enhancing proposition. We have ended the year with our NAV per share at 671 pence, up from 662 pence last year-end. Our cash position was GBP 89 million, with a further GBP 30 million subsequently received post-year-end from the realizations of Freetrade and Lyst.
In addition, our managed EIS and VCT funds held a further GBP 23 million ready for investment, and we also have an undrawn RCF of GBP 60 million available. As Ben alluded to earlier, we're in a strong balance sheet capital position. After a difficult couple of years in FY 2023 and FY 2024, it's pleasing to see some recovery and growth starting to come through in the portfolio. We target annual returns of 20% through the cycle, and as you can see from this chart, we have delivered an average annual return of 28% since IPO. After the strong valuation growth in FY 2021 and FY 2022, we were quick to bring down valuations in H1 of FY 2023 as economic conditions took a turn for the worse.
FY 2024 saw a more stabilized, if still difficult, market environment, so it's really positive to see a gradual return to fair value growth in FY 2025 with increases in both H1 and H2 of this year, following on from an increase in H2 of FY 2024. Obviously, we never want to call the bottom of any cycle, or we would like to call the bottom of a cycle, but it's dangerous to make predictions, and there's still ongoing geopolitical and macro uncertainty, as everyone can see, but we are really positive about our portfolio and its prospects moving forward. Really, the key message in this slide is that our experience and our expertise as a firm means that we can manage the portfolio through the ups and downs and still deliver those target annual returns through a cycle. Realizations are a similar story to the previous slide.
Obviously, we need to generate portfolio fair value growth, but then we also need to turn that into cash at the optimal point for each investment. We target annual realizations of 10% of the portfolio value through the cycle, and you can see from the chart that since IPO, we've delivered average annual realizations of 15%. It's a similar pattern to the previous slide, with strong levels of proceeds being returned in FY 2021 and FY 2022, with a marked slowdown in FY20 23 and FY 2024 as market conditions changed and exits became much more difficult. FY 2025, however, was an exceptionally productive year, and although we don't expect to get to the same level this year, it is pleasing to report that we have already received GBP 30 million in proceeds post-year-end from the Freetrade and Lyst realizations, and we continue to work on other potential exits in the portfolio.
Again, this slide demonstrates our ability to manage the portfolio through the cycle. This is a key feature of our model. It allows us to allocate liquidity to fund the next generation of category-leading portfolio companies and to return capital to shareholders through our share buyback program. I would encourage you all to look at our full annual report and accounts, as there is a great section in there on realizations written by our Chief Portfolio Officer, Richard Marsh, on our approach to exits and how we differentiate and add value there. The PLC deployed GBP 73 million into investments during FY 2025.
Again, I would encourage you all to look at the annual report and accounts, and not just because I'm CFO, also because it includes a lot of detail on these companies, as we have included a piece in there on each one detailing why we are excited about it, just to really try and get across to everyone what is the reason for investing in this company. To give you a flavor, here are some examples. In the GBP 15 million of new deals, we led a Series C investment into Deciphex, an AI-powered leader in digital pathology. It's transforming patient care by allowing pathologists to work up to 40% faster while maintaining diagnostic accuracy. In the GBP 20 million of follow-ons to support the scaling of our existing portfolio, we invested into Manna, a drone delivery company.
Anyone here that knows me will know this is one that I always get excited about, not just because I love takeaways. They are actually doing really well as a business. They have done over 180,000 deliveries now to date from their current two live hubs in Dublin and Helsinki, proving out their model. They are now poised to really scale with major commercial agreements signed with the likes of DoorDash, Just Eat, and just recently, they announced another one with Deliveroo. The GBP 19 million secondary was Connect Ventures One, and we talked about that at the interim because that was done just before the interim results, and we covered the portfolio at the time. Basically, the two key late-stage assets in there were Typeform, which is form-building software, and Soldo, which is spend management software.
Finally, we've put GBP 19 million into our earlier stage investments in Fund of Funds Program and Early Bird, and these help to feed the pipeline of future winners in the portfolio. Building on a fair value uplift in H2 of FY 2024, as I alluded to earlier, it's good to see a further fair value uplift in the portfolio in both H1 and H2 of FY 2025. As a Pan-European VC tech investor, we do have FX exposure to both euro and U.S. dollar valuations of portfolio companies, and there was an adverse FX movement in H1 in particular, which partially offset these fair value gains. Most of the investment deployment was in H1, primarily because of the GBP 19 million secondary acquisition of Connect Ventures One.
In terms of the GPV progression for the year overall, you can see that the exceptional year for realizations exceeding investment deployment has meant that GPV is very slightly down despite the fair value uplift. Okay, on this slide, we visually represent the core portfolio fair value and the movements in it with a fan graph. I just highlight that the scales are slightly different on each side, as Revolut has had such strong growth in the year that it was skewing it, so that we have had to calibrate them slightly differently between the left and the right-hand side. In terms of the main movements, the main downward valuation was Thought Machine.
Now, this was really all taken in H1, and we talked about this at the interim, but just to go over that again, we highlighted that it was really just down to timing of getting revenue live versus their plan. They're signing tier one banks. They announced Bpif rance recently, for example, but core banking software is obviously complex, and it just takes a bit longer to get these big blocks of customers live, but it is making good operational progress. In fact, in H2, we took the valuation back up slightly, so we anticipate that will continue to grow back as the contracts go live and they make big jumps in their ARR. In terms of the growth, Revolut's obviously the big story. I think everyone knows about Revolut. It gets a lot of coverage.
It's growing strongly, 73% growth in revenue, more than 50 million customers, number one finance app in 19 European countries, revenue nearly $4 billion now in PBT of $1 billion. We have taken the valuation up to $45 billion, which is in line with the secondaries that happened during the year, and our holding now, even net of those small realizations, is nearly GBP 160 million. Other ones we would call out are Ledger, which is a crypto hardware and software business. They have wallets, cold storage wallets, which are selling very well. Encouragingly, they are also generating strong revenue growth and improved margins from the software that goes with those hardware wallets, so they are not just committed to hardware revenues. Obviously, with the change of administration in the U.S. and a more favorable environment to crypto, that is helping them with their growth as well.
Aircall, again, I would call out, it just has consistent revenue growth, more than 20% annually, consistently. It's now profitable. It's introducing further AI-driven enhancements, which should boost the product, and it's just a really good, solid growing business. In general, I would highlight that there's a lot more green areas across the fan, so that is pleasing to see and positive. I would highlight once again that the realizations this year at or above holding value should give investors confidence with these proof points of the valuations of these companies. Looking ahead, we're optimistic. Our exciting, resilient, and diversified portfolio has delivered a fair value uplift and increased NAV per share in what is a challenging environment, with a strong level of realizations returning capital to the balance sheet, and we've taken a disciplined, balanced approach to capital allocation, including share buybacks.
I'll now hand you back to Ben to talk about our business model, the portfolio, in a bit more detail and outlook.
Good back. Thank you, Andy. A strong set of numbers with a balance across the portfolio, so good to have that detail. I thought what I would do is take us through our model and remind people about how we create value over time. You can see here that we pool several different capital vehicles. We have the PLC, Evergreen Balance Sheet, we have the EIS and the VCT funds, and alongside that, we have some smaller third-party pools of capital. What we do with each of these pools is look to the same deal flow and where it can co-invest with an agreed strategy that enhances our ability to invest capital into a breadth of companies.
For example, a Series A investment, which is U.K. qualifying, will have some capital from the balance sheet, but it will also have some capital coming from the EIS and the VCT funds, and that ensures that we can invest at the right level to win the right quality of deals in the market. Those pools of capital have always been an important component of our model, and we'll look to expand those in the future as we bring in more institutional capital from the private sources alongside at the Series B level. We then deploy that money into three different ways of creating value or getting access to opportunities. The first is investing directly into businesses. This is where we sit on the boards of the companies. It's where we can help their growth journey, and that's the primary investment source that we utilize.
The other routes are through fund of funds, where we invest as an investor into other funds, principally at the seed stage, where we look to get that deal flow and that access coming through that earlier stage part of the market and that geographical reach that we will not be able to achieve without having presence in those regions ourselves. That is an important funnel for us. Finally, through secondaries, as I mentioned earlier, this is where we can get access to later stage portfolios of assets with mature companies that we can value, that we can also have a proximity or an approximation of their growth path, given that they will have strength in depth in their financials and they will have a secure go-to-market strategy.
That therefore allows us to take those mature businesses, price them, and we'll look to realize them in a shorter time frame than you would do a direct investment. Helping those companies grow is a key feature of our model. As I say, we sit on the boards, but also we provide the access to our own network, and we do that with hiring. We do that with access to commercial traction with companies that are in our ecosystem, and then we'll help the businesses in terms of their go-to-market strategies as well. Those tend to be the key areas that we will focus on. Providing that depth of expertise is crucial to ensuring that the companies we invest in have the best opportunities to achieve their scaling goals. The final piece that we touched on here is realizing at the right time for the business.
Around 80% of the realizations we achieve are through trade sales. I often think about this almost as like an outsourced R&D model, where larger companies want to buy in new technology that's been incubated in the ecosystem outside of their own companies. They will pay strategic premiums for those businesses beyond just the financial metrics of those companies because they're buying IP or they're buying innovation that they can't deliver themselves. There are exits through IPOs, particularly where there's a buoyant market. We haven't had one of those for a couple of years, but it's a smaller proportion of how we achieve our exits. As we saw with M-Files in this period, you often will see capital coming in from sort of buyout private equity where they want to recap those mature businesses, and that's another opportunity for us to take capital out of those companies.
That capital is then recycled, and then we can start that process again, but with a clear capital allocation policy that we've outlined to investors how we will reinvest that money. I wanted to give a bit more of a flavor of the portfolio approach to creating value. This is a chart that talks to the GBP 660 million of realizations that we've had, and what we can clearly see here is that with venture capital, the returns are very much skewed to the winners. It's an asset class that's determined by the power law, where the winning companies compound growth, high growth over periods of time. In the technology sphere, you'll often see that occurring in the years 10, 15 onwards in the life of those businesses. Once they achieve a certain scale, they can compound that growth. That's where outsized returns are delivered.
You will also see that that comes from around 30% of our invested capital. Even with investing at the Series A and Series B stage, it's not the earliest stage of investing, but you're still taking risk with these companies. Therefore, building a portfolio, being consistent with vintage creation, and then managing your companies to their goals is a key feature of the venture capital model. Quite often, investing in companies is just the first part of that journey, and you're with these businesses for a long period of time. What is also true is that we, as a firm, will spend a significant amount of time with very good companies, but ones that won't eventually scale to deliver those outsized returns.
The value of the businesses that have inherent underlying IP, that have strong gross margins, but will ultimately not deliver that compounding growth outsized returns, we will work very hard with those to find them either a new home for the next level stage of their growth or working with those teams to find new opportunities to scale. Delivering that capital back is a key feature of our model and ensuring we can protect our capital and our shareholder returns. You'll see in those middle cohorts of delivering returns 1-3x, which are still profitable, but not the outsized returns that determine the entire growth of our portfolio returns. Sometimes delivering returns that are less than the capital we invested, but still crucially bringing value back is where we will work very actively as a team.
That just demonstrates the importance of portfolio creation and portfolio management within this model. Managing that risk is clearly possible. It's something we've delivered over many market cycles, but you need the expertise to be able to achieve that. I outlined at the outset of the presentation the importance of vintage creation, and I think this slide does a really good job of showing the core companies that we're leaning on as the key value drivers in the portfolio now. There's GBP 800 million of value in those 17 companies, but we made those first investments many years ago. The job of a venture capitalist is to be ahead of technology trends and making investment bets, if you like, on companies that have the ability to scale and grow into significant global markets, either by disrupting existing markets or by creating new markets.
You can see with each of these core companies that we highlight here, the importance of that vintage creation and therefore the importance of that consistency of being in the market. You can see also the multiples that can be returned, and particularly over time, the 2016 and 2018 cohorts with higher multiples on invested capital as they have now had more time to mature. We will hold on to those winning companies to create that value over longer periods of time, and compounding that growth that comes through is a key feature of an Evergreen Balance Sheet model that gives us that flexibility to hold the winners for longer. We have always touched on the areas of technology that we focus on.
We are a generalist investor, so we're broad across the technology sphere, but within our generalist approach, we have experts and domain expertise amongst our investment team. Those four broad buckets of consumer, technology, enterprise, hardware, deep tech, and digital health can be subdivided into those subsectors that we're addressing. I think it's very important for our shareholders to see that we are getting them access to the new generational shifts in technology that are disrupting markets and creating value, be that in fintech, be that in cybersecurity, quantum, climate space, cryptocurrency, and blockchain we've touched on, and then the digital health areas where you've got significant deep markets that are going to be driven through efficiencies and productivity by the technology that's created to achieve that.
As we grow and scale our economies, or rather we currently see limited growth in those economies and shifting patterns of populations, we need technology to work harder for us to enable productivity. AI is clearly a feature of the market that sits across all of these subsectors, and AI will be a tool that drives increased productivity. We're seeing investments where they're built on the back of AI first, so we call those AI-native companies, but we're also seeing our existing portfolio react and adopt to AI with new product offerings on the back of those tools. I think the market, if anything, is accelerating in that technology innovation, and those are creating incredible opportunities for us to invest and create the value in the future that comes from these businesses. The portfolio in aggregate from the PLC side is GBP 1.3 billion of value.
That is split between over GBP 800 million in the core companies, the 17 that we touched on, and then we have another GBP 300 million in the emerging portfolio supplanted with fund investments alongside. If we touch a little bit more on the emerging portfolio here, you can see that the split of those investments across those areas that we invest into is very consistent, and our approach has been very consistent. The prevalence of enterprise technology is still the key feature of our investing where corporates need that efficiency, they need that productivity, they need security that comes from technology, and they will continue to invest in what can be considered as critical infrastructure for their growth.
A lot of our portfolio is exposed to this, and the top 15 companies outside of the core have strong growth rates, growing from a lower base, of course, than those more mature companies, but demonstrating the traction and the growth that we would like to see in those companies. Given that the core is the majority of the value, GBP 800 million of value, which is still above our current market cap, you can focus just on the core if you wish to. The growth of those businesses is slowing as they mature because it is coming off a higher base, but that maturity of over GBP 400 million of average revenues is demonstrated.
44% of those companies are either now profitable or turning to profitability, but still maintaining very strong gross margins, and those are attractive companies in any portfolio, certainly from the perspective of technology companies and the multiples that they can command given these metrics. You can see that also the strength of their own balance sheets is demonstrated in the chart on the right-hand side, and that's been improving and increasing over time, clearly particularly as they move to profitability. The one stat that we've added in here is just to give people a sense. It slightly goes back to the point about the stage in the market that we invest, is that the average age of those companies in the core is 11 years, quite young for fairly mature businesses in some senses, but we've been investing in those companies for an average of five years.
That means that there's on average a six-year period where they're maturing and growing and proving their commercial model before we deploy capital into those companies. That again demonstrates a key feature of our model. To touch on this in more detail, we have two case studies here. The first one, Revolut, because it's clearly created so much value, it has a prominence in the market, and the company themselves are also putting out more of their own information, which allows us to touch on some of the journey of our own investment with this business. We first invested in that company back in 2018, so we're already seven years invested in the company.
The business and the scale that it's achieved in a short period of time, so only 10 years old with over GBP 3 billion of revenue and 50 million customers, is incredibly impressive even in the fast-growing technology sphere. Our investment in 2018 was at the time where the company was scaling revenue very rapidly, had the ability to grow its product base very quickly, so their own innovation and ability to spin out new products was something that we were most impressed by at the time that we invested. You can see the journey of their scaling as they've delivered over that time. I think as most people know, the sentiment around the business was not always linear in the way that their revenues have grown.
This is a good proof point for scaling companies, how there will be bumps in the road, be that sentiment or otherwise, but it is up to those teams to prove out their journey and overcome those bumps in the road. I think Revolut have been a great example of being able to achieve that. In terms of our own investment, we have been happy to see the growth continue and therefore happy to hold our position. Even in 2020, looking to get additional secondaries when the valuation that had been achieved was perhaps accelerating ahead of where the market was. You can see the multiples had expanded into those 2020-2021 periods of funding. As the company continues to deliver and continues to compound growth, that has given us an opportunity in the last year to take some of our value creation off the table.
Revolut themselves had led a secondary, and we took some of our liquidity out of the business at that point. Continuing to compound growth above 70%, still very much a company that we believe in. I think now that they've demonstrated a scale, you can see that they're achieving great things globally, and their ability to continue to grow is really apparent, particularly as they push into new markets and replicate their efficient go-to-market strategy. The next company I wanted to touch on is Ledger. Ledger, again, we invested in that 2017, 2018 period. This was at the time when cryptocurrency was becoming more prominent. Instead of choosing which of the cryptocurrencies that were available might be the winning option, this is a good example of how we tend to play technology themes. Here we invested in an infrastructure layer.
Ledger provides the security that underpins blockchain and cryptocurrency, allowing investors to store securely on their own devices. As the product suite of Ledger has iterated over time, that's improved the user experience, the user interfaces, and it's moving more towards a phone-type device where you can hold and store securely, but you can also trade your cryptocurrency through the Ledger platform, which has done a couple of things for them. One is obviously driving hardware sales, but then it's also driving recurring revenue sales for them as well. Their revenue mix has improved over time as they scaled as a business. As Andrew outlined earlier, they're scaling very strongly now, good tailwinds in the market. This is an example where seven years beyond when we first invested, that's a mature company. It's driving profitability, but it's also driving global scale and recognition.
That seven-year journey, again, will be lumpy, partly because of the vagaries of the Bitcoin price in that period of time and the level of acceptance of new technologies. I think at this stage, we can clearly see that Ledger is a winner in its market, and it has a lot of opportunities to continue to scale further. To finish, before we go to questions, I'd just like to reiterate the fact that FY 2026 has started strongly for us with continued realizations. It is a process that we drive methodically, and this isn't just one-offs. We'll continue to harvest and manage the portfolio at the appropriate times where opportunities for value creation are there or turning companies into cash that we can recycle. That recycling allows an ongoing share buyback. We're trading at significant discounts of around 50% to the value of the underlying portfolio.
Buying back our own shares is something that we and the board want to support, and we have about another GBP 6 million-GBP 7 million of that to go in the current program. We will continue to focus on those strategic priorities that I outlined in February, and we reiterated those at the start of the call. I think all of that points to the investment rationale for Molten. The shareholders in Molten get access to an asset class which is traditionally hard to access. It is hard to get access to private companies. It is hard to manage them and have the infrastructure and the experience to do that.
By buying a share in Molten, you're getting access to the underlying balance sheet of companies day one, but with a liquid wrapper, you can trade the shares daily, and that's a feature that I think is quite distinct to other parts of the market and getting exposure to these companies. The Evergreen Balance Sheet gives us the ability to create value both in direct investing, but also through secondaries and also through being an LP in other parts of the market. It gives us a lot of flexibility to create value over time, and our ability to do that is driven by our brand and our depth of expertise that everybody's getting access to. There are multiple sources of capital. They're an important feature of the model.
have been very good at innovating those sources of capital, and I will back us to continue to do that as the market matures, particularly in the European ecosystem. That track record of exits continues to be demonstrated. With over GBP 660 million brought back to the balance sheet, selling at or above the holding value in those occurrences, I think we have proven that we can continue to deliver on those promises. The disciplined capital allocation is a key feature of the model. It is important in terms of making sure we can support the value of the NAV, but we can also create value into new opportunities. We are very excited about the current ecosystem in Europe. We think it is growing and scaling.
We can see that the generational shifts in technology that are occurring now create significant opportunity for value creation, and we feel that we have the expertise and the right structure of capital to take advantage of that. We are very excited for this coming year, but also the several years beyond that. I will say thank you here. We will pause. I will hand back to our host, Alessandro, and we will then turn to questions.
Perfect. Ben, Andrew, thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just using the Q&A tab that is situated on the top right-hand corner of your screen.
While the company takes a few moments to review the questions that have been submitted today, I'd like to remind you that the recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboards. As you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. Ben, perhaps at this point, I could hand back to you to read out the questions, and I'll pick up from you at the end.
Very good. What I'll do is I'll go through the questions, and then Andy and I will take the ones which are most appropriate to us. We had a question on addressing the discount to NAV.
Hopefully, I've addressed that, but just to reiterate the point, it's something the board is acutely aware of, and obviously, we focus on trying to deliver that. I think the first strategy or the first point was the realizations, making sure that we're selling the assets above the holding value when it's appropriate. If they continue to grow and scale, then clearly that's the best value creation point. If we feel like we're able to get liquidity at an attractive price, then we will work towards that. Then proving the value of the assets and using that liquidity that comes back in the manner of our capital allocation policy. Share buybacks have been important, I would say, over the last year, but they're also not the magic one that drives a narrowing of that discount.
If anything, I think the discount will likely narrow more with capital flows coming back into the fund managers that invest in this space. For us, it's a question of focusing on the things that we can manage and ensuring we continue to deliver. Just going through a few more of the questions. There's quite a lot on NAV per share. There's a question of, are we expecting them to be above trend going forward? The way I'll probably answer this is to consider where our target returns are. We have target returns of 20% on the portfolio in terms of the fair value growth of those businesses. The average growth of the core businesses has slowed to around 36% because of their levels of maturity.
The growth in the underlying portfolio is still strong, and what we will see driving that 20% target returns is, of course, even in a consistent multiple environment, seeing the growth of those businesses. As they achieve growth, we should see that fair value growth continuing. We're balancing realizations, which obviously take value out of the portfolio, and then returning that cash either through new investments or into share buybacks. Share buybacks have a short-term NAV per share accretive value. We've seen that in the last year where, I think, GBP 0.08 of the NAV per share has been increased through the buybacks and reducing the number of shares that are in issuance. That will be an important feature, but so too will be the growth that we see from the underlying assets, the opportunities.
Your ability to compound that growth over time is clearly the key determinant of growing the NAV and growing the NAV per share as well. Some of the questions here on reporting, maybe Andy will ask you to touch on this. It is around the ratios that we can provide on the portfolio on an aggregated basis. We have tried here to give a bit more detail on the core companies and their growth rates and their margins. Again, we have shone a bit more of a light on the emerging portfolio in a similar way. Maybe Andy, I will ask you to touch on some of that reporting thinking we have been doing through the annual report.
I was going to say, I think we've tried to do that this year with the emerging, calling that the emerging core and adding some information on the revenue growth rates in that section of the portfolio. The fact that it's growing at 100% across that cohort on average is demonstrating the growth rate in that group that's below the core. We've also provided quite a lot of detail on the core, as usual, with growth rates of around 40% and the detail on the cash runway just to give that assurance as to their financing. In terms of comps, the average comps across the sector are about 6-7x, although we have a wide range between 1 and 20 because there's obviously a wide range of comp companies.
We did see some softening in that technology sector overall, which, as we said before, has contributed to some of the downward valuations. We would hope to see those start to pick up again this year.
Thank you. A question here on the share price and kind of the contributing factors to the movements in the share price. I think what we've seen, certainly over the last, I think I'm right to say it's about 45 months of outflows into U.K. fund managers. We've seen our shareholder base be supportive, but having to manage its own capital pools. With that, if they are having outflows, they clearly need to manage their own liquidity. Capital coming out of their funds leads to selling of their existing portfolio. That's been a feature.
I do not think we have seen substantial changes in our share register composition, but obviously, as fund managers have inflows and outflows, we see some of the impact of that on our own price, positive and negative. What we have also seen is changes of fund managers, which leads to some selling pressure for a period of time. The stock has largely absorbed that through the daily trading. I think the liquidity is quite good. We tend to get around 600,000-700,000 shares a day trading. Where we can drive marginal buyers, that is clearly our job as a team, and being out on the road and seeing new investors is a key feature of what we do. We spend time in the U.S., we spend time in Europe, and then making sure that our U.K. shareholder base is understanding our story well.
We think about our investor relations, the quality of the website, the quality of the materials. If people do have feedback on that, we always listen to that and try to adapt accordingly. What ultimately will drive the marginal buyers, the factors that are outside of our control are things like interest rates and capital flows. We have had a period like all other companies in the market where that has been difficult for a few years, just delivering on the core components of the business, proving the value, proving the resilience is clearly where we can spend our time and then making sure that investors hear those messages. We have been, in the last six months, seeing a lot more interest from new holders or new potential holders, and that is clearly a positive sign as fund managers try to look to new investments.
Again, that's going to be somewhat determined by volatility in wider markets and their own capital availability so that they can look at new opportunities.
There's one on AI that I can take on how we're using AI internally. I guess in common with a lot of businesses, we're finding AI very exciting to use, not just to invest in, but obviously as a workflow tool and an efficiency tool. We've spent a bit of time creating our policies and data governance because obviously we do have a lot of confidential data on companies. We have to be careful in terms of which tools. You do not want to have a tool that's training and using confidential information. We've got to a good place with that. We're now using it for research. We're using it for workflows. We're using it to automate tasks.
We set up a cross-functional group to assess and look at different tools, and we're now implementing them, and it's really starting to make a difference. We are very excited to use that internally as well as to be investing in companies that are applying AI, but I think it's going to be a common universal theme across businesses.
The next question is on our reason to delist from Euronext Dublin. That was a decision that we took on the basis that we were not seeing any liquidity flows coming through that listing. It was a listing that came in in 2016 at the time with the original IPO onto the AIM market. Given that we were not seeing any flows there, most of the investors were coming through the London market, we felt that that was an unnecessary cost for us to bear.
It did have additional costs of maintaining the listing, but also from European compliance regulations that would get captured by. That just did not make sense anymore. Our Irish shareholder base, which is strong and very welcome, of course, are mostly trading through that London exchange. It did not really make a lot of sense to continue to maintain that going forward. There is a question here on Series B investing. I outlined earlier, but just to reiterate, we think that Series B, and the way I would characterize Series B, is a company that maybe has $5 million-$10 million of revenues in terms of its commercial traction.
It's really about having a proven go-to-market strategy at that stage where you've got a product that's been built, you've been selling it to customers, you've been ideally upselling to certain of your key customers, and then maybe building out that cohort of additional customers alongside. It is really seeing those proof points of commercial traction. The reason that I think that's an attractive part of the market is because you can diligence those proof points, but also you can see a team that's growing and scaling. That's where our expertise to help them grow to the next level alongside the capital that we can provide can add the most value. It's also a part of the market in Europe, which is quite hard to find funding for.
There tends to be a gap at that stage before the companies get to more scale and more maturity, and then there's additional capital that's available to them. I think that's the intersection where we can add the most value and also create the most value.
Next one's on non-investment cash movements. I'll take that. It's a nice technical question that relates to our GPV table. Really, that's an internal adjustment for PPS. Where we have a PPS charge from the underlying structures, really, the way to think about it is operating costs, covering the operating costs of these, and it's an allocation between the valuation of the portfolio and the cash and the operating costs of the business.
By PPS, you mean priority profit?
Priority profit share, sorry. Yes. Management acronym, yeah.
Thank you.
Question on the British Business Bank, asking about our relationship with them, how much work we do with them. As an institution, they've been very supportive to us. They are a shareholder in the business, in the PLC, but also someone that we've co-invested with in underlying portfolio companies. It's very pleasing to see that they get additional support from the government. We think that they play a critical role in the U.K. ecosystem for seed investing, but also to later stage, be that as an investor into funds, but also directly into companies. While companies have these gaps to capital that are identified, I think they can play a critical role in supporting the technology that's clearly being created in the IP that's clearly being created in the U.K. ecosystem. We work with them closely.
We're very pleased to see that they've been growing and scaling, and I think there's definitely more opportunities for us to do more together. There's a question alongside this on EIS and VCT pools of capital, but thinking around other pools of capital that we can build and scale. Where I talk about co-investment at Series B, I'm really thinking around pools of capital that are institutional, be they pension funds as an example. We've been working alongside the British Private Equity & Venture Capital Association, the BVCA, and the British Business Bank and other participants in that market around the mansion house reforms.
I think there's clearly an opportunity there for pension funds to get access to private markets, and we will try to facilitate that where we can, but also other pools of capital that participate at those levels and want to come into the deal flow that we have and creating private vehicles that can come in and co-invest on agreed metrics, be that, let's say, for a EUR 20 million Series B investment in the European ecosystem, that could be a EUR 10 million ticket from the PLC balance sheet alongside a EUR 10 million investment ticket from that pool of capital that we will build. I think the co-investment pools continue to be attractive, and they're a sensible way to ensure that we're investing at the right scale in the market as that market has been maturing.
Clearly, we're not going to raise new capital into the PLC with the share price we're trading, and we wouldn't be able to deploy consistently $20 million tickets into the Series B stage of the market with the balance sheet capital we have now. Building out those co-investment pools is very sensible. The benefit for the PLC shareholder is the quality of deal flow, first and foremost. I think seeing Molten's ability to be investing in the market into those deals at that stage and doing that consistently is important to get access to the best deals. It is also true that if you're managing third-party money, you can charge fees, and those fees, the management fees that come through, will improve our income into the PLC and offset the cost base further.
There's an additional benefit to the PLC shareholder from having those pools of capital.
I can take this next one on the indices and the market comp. The indices that we use are, well, all of them essentially, the comparable companies are selected based on as close a comparability as possible. It's not always possible to get an identical match, obviously, with innovative tech businesses. It could be NASDAQ listed, it could be S&P listed, FTSE listed. There's a mixture of indices that are used in terms of the comps, and it will vary investment by investment. I would just maybe add that about 40% of our portfolio were valued on the market comps basis this year, maybe 45%. Obviously, under valuation guidelines, there's different methodologies that you use.
If there's been a more recent funding round, you'll pin it to that round, or you'll calibrate from that round as it moves further away. That's just to give a bit of context to how prevalent the comps are in the valuations.
Conscious of time, we'll rattle through the last few questions if we can. Question on the space sector, how excited are we about that and defense spend? I think this is a key shift in the market that we've all seen over the last six months as Europe opens up to the fact that we have to spend more on defense and particularly our own technologies. Companies like ICEYE are clearly a beneficiary of that with dual-use technologies in their case with a constellation of low-earth orbit satellites.
They can use the data and the images to support defense, but also commercial applications to insurance companies as one example for climate change-related aspects, be that flood risk or fire risk. The ability of technology to be dual-use is quite apparent. Companies like Hadean will be another example in our portfolio that have that. Increased defense spending is generally a positive for technology because that's where a lot of the capital goes to, and that's where a lot of the use cases can be addressed. That is a positive shift for the ecosystem. I think we've answered the next question on AI within our operations. There's a question on staff retention. We are augmenting our investment team with new hires, and I think that's just a normal cadence of bringing new people in.
We've also brought in a Chief People Officer to support those structures around hiring, but also around training and retention of the teams. I think that will improve the sort of cultural aspects of the firm supporting what I do as well. As technology shifts and as the focus of technology shifts, you often need to bring in new capabilities alongside your existing team. That is very much a feature of the model. What is also true of venture capital is that it's a long-cycle investment, and therefore you tend to have people that have been with the firm for very long periods of time. That's true of us. We've had people that have been here for 20+ years and might continue to be the case.
It's important to get that balance right about giving people growth opportunities, but also accepting that sometimes people will go on to new areas in the market. There's a question on the Evergreen Balance Sheet. To Molten, for me, that is a balance sheet where you can recycle the capital. So instead of realizing companies in a GP/LP structure where it isn't an Evergreen Balance Sheet, that capital goes back to the investors, and then you have to raise new funds. We have the ability to recycle, but it also means that we're not constrained by fund life criteria. A traditional fund will be a 10-year fund with two one-year extensions. In our balance sheet, that's clearly available for us for an unlimited period of time. If we see the growth in those companies continuing, we can continue to hold and create the value.
I think, Andy, this question on the capital, the cash position, maybe you can take that one.
The cash, we had GBP 90 million cash at year-end, plus those GBP 30 million of proceeds, which we discussed from Lyst and Freetrade. In terms of the debt, we have a GBP 120 million term loan facility, a NAV facility, that's drawn and runs out to October 2027. Obviously, we have the unused RCF of GBP 60 million available as well.
Perfect. Ben, Andrew, I might just jump in there. I think you've covered a lot of ground there and answered a lot of questions there from investors. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to you both, Ben, could I just ask you for a few closing comments?
Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you to everyone that's joined us.
We really appreciate the opportunity to speak to you and to have this engagement with you. We try to make sure that we spend our time with institutional investors and also addressing important retail investors. As I say, we try to look at the reporting material and the videos and such like that are on the website, try to give more color in what we do and more depth. I encourage you to look at those as well as reading the great work that's gone into the annual report. For us, we're very excited about the future of Molten, but also the future of the venture capital ecosystem in Europe. I think it's an exciting time. I think the last two, three years have proven that we can manage through market cycles.
Yes, there's work to do to narrow the share price discount to the NAV, but I think everyone can see that the strength of the portfolio is there, the strength of our team is there, and the exciting opportunities that we're able to get access to are unique in the market. We look forward to being able to give our investors exposure to those on a continued basis.
Thank you, everyone, for your time.
Ben, Andrew, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order for the management team to better understand your views and expectations? On behalf of the management team of Molten Ventures, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.