Good morning, everybody, and welcome to IP Group's 2021 Full Year Results Presentation. As many of you will know, the group celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2021, and I'm pleased to be reporting record results for this 20th year. I'm also pleased to be able to tell you that I believe our opportunity to unlock the value of science in the future is even more significant than in the past. On today's call, we have myself, Greg Smith, the Chief Executive. We have David Baynes, Chief Financial and Operating Officer. We have Sam Williams, Managing Partner of Life Sciences, and we have Mark Reilly, Managing Partner, Tech. As you probably know, this is my first set of results as CEO, having taken over the role in October after 10 years as Group CFO.
Full year results presentations are therefore very normal territory. Yet it feels somewhat strange to be here talking about financial results when there's such considerable disruption occurring only 1,500 mi away from us here in our new head office in London's Knowledge Quarter. Our thoughts are very much with all those affected. Despite that, for the next little while, our job today is to take you through what we at IP Group achieved last year, and there is a lot to talk about. Of course, the paradox of the uncertainty caused by these significant geopolitical events and indeed other major global challenges such as climate change is that it makes it all the more important for businesses like ours to set out and deliver on a compelling vision.
In terms of the plan for today, I'll cover a short overview and then my plans for evolving and sharpening and focusing the strategy of the business, and this includes an update on a number of our highest conviction companies. That's at least in part to address the question that I know many of you have raised, which is what's next after Nanopore? To give you some additional color on that question, today we have some short videos from the excellent leaders of three of these highest conviction companies, so you can hear the story in their own words. Dave will briefly run through the results for the year, and I'll wrap up with summary and outlook, and then on to questions. If you could all please post questions in the Q&A section, we will endeavor to cover them all.
By way of overview, the one-minute version is in three parts this year. Firstly, the group had another record year in 2021. Record return on assets, almost half a billion GBP, record realizations, and a strong liquidity position. Secondly, coming off of a record year and a position of real strength, I and the leadership team have taken the time to reflect on what we've learned and define how we will take on the next two decades and build the next generation of companies that will have a real impact on the world. Thirdly, we've continued the work that I've led over the past few years to ensure our approach to capital and to returns will scale our business sustainably over the long term.
Over that time, I've had a clear focus on unlocking value from our model, value and returns for shareholders. This is about balancing the competing uses for our capital, investing for long-term growth, but also providing returns to shareholders. Now, as examples of that, we returned 34% on our assets this year, but in line with our policy, we distributed a proportion of our cash realizations, a total of over GBP 50 million over the past twelve months through our first dividends and our first buyback program. So briefly on our results. Our financial performance in 2021 surpassed all prior years. You know, financially, we're a very simple business to understand. Net assets, returns, and cash being the main financial KPIs. We delivered a return for the year of a profit of GBP 450 million.
The outcome, as some of the analyst notes have picked up this morning, was about 5% ahead of the GBP 425 million that we estimated in our trading statement in January. We again generated cash realizations for around GBP 200 million, and this meant that we finished the year with a strong financial position, GBP 270 million of net cash. Dave will add a bit more color to these results shortly. Before I move on to the vision, I just wanted to talk very briefly about the impact of heightened geopolitical risk, inflation, and our ability to adapt to current circumstances. I guess there's sort of two important points to make here. Clearly, markets are volatile right now.
You know, public market valuations, appetite for high growth companies is reduced, and in some sectors, such as biotech, particularly in the U.S., this has exacerbated reductions that began during 2021. David Baynes will talk about the impact of that on our NAV since year-end. Secondly, we're planning for the fact that the, you know, the funding environment for at least some of our companies may be more challenging for a period of time. In light of that, our strong cash position and liquidity is a real strategic asset. Like everyone else, we, you know, we don't know how long this period will last or when the cycles in public markets and the specific sub-sectors that we operate in will improve. However, I am confident that our portfolio companies will continue to make progress.
I'm gonna come on and talk about some of those milestones for the year shortly, and a number have announced further funding rounds this year already. It's important for you, as our shareholders, to know that we're in a position where we can invest capital to support the development of our most compelling companies to ensure that we continue to unlock value for you. Despite some of these sort of shorter-term challenges, I now want to update you on the type of business that we're aspiring to create at IP Group. 'Cause I believe at IP Group, we have a business that can and is having a big impact, making a change, making a dent, and unlocking value in doing so. There's real momentum growing around what we're doing.
You know, the wider sector in which we operate has changed and grown in recent years. It, you know, in many ways, it's sort of finally catching up with us. Post-COVID, you'll have seen recent announcements from people like Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz talking about using breakthrough science and innovation to solve big problems. In Oxford Nanopore and Ceres Power, we've helped to create and build two separate billion-dollar companies from U.K. science. The past couple of months aside, you know, longer term investment appetite in our space has seen significant levels of private capital committed. For example, our analysis of the clean tech market in Europe showed that the number of VC funds with explicit green positioning tripled between the start of the year and COP26 in November, with the quantum of capital having increased by more than 10 times.
We therefore, you know, we believe that the medium to long-term macro environment will be very supportive of our business and our portfolio companies. Of course, others entering the sector means that we need to ensure we remain ahead of the pack, and crucially, we have the experience and the expertise, particularly in our investment teams and a strong portfolio poised for further growth that I believe will allow us to do so. During my first six months as CEO, and given those successes in 2021, I've been working with the wider leadership team to really develop and sharpen the strategy to build on these great foundations. I think really deliver a step change in the impact and the companies that we can have on the world and the value that we can unlock in doing so.
IP Group is a very purpose-led business. You know, we've been founded on this idea of evolving science and innovation into world-changing businesses, and this will remain a big part of the group's approach. Our vision is a better future through the impact of science and technology-based companies that we have identified, backed, and grown together as long-term partners. The step change is really in how we plan to deliver this. A consistent theme here is one of increasing focus. Firstly, you know, we're driven by having a meaningful impact on the world, and we're implicitly a company that's driven by impact. You know, many of our companies are already creating impact every day.
This will be more of a focus, and you will see more of this and our company's products reaching more people's lives. Secondly, and consistent with this, we're increasingly focusing our capital, our resources, and our expertise on clear thematic areas. Thirdly, our greatest returns and impact have come from the companies addressing big societal need and big commercial opportunity. You will see us increasingly focusing our capital and resource to accelerate a smaller number of conviction companies where their market opportunity, their product market fit, and their progress means that we consider them the most compelling. Importantly, we'll continue that work that I've led over recent years to evolve and successfully apply our capital allocation framework to build IP Group sustainably for the next 20 years and beyond.
Our shareholder value proposition comprises primarily capital growth over the medium term, alongside return of a proportion of all cash realizations in the form of growing dividends, and, you know, as was the case at the end of 2021, other mechanisms such as buybacks. The thematic areas that we will be focusing on are those companies whose products and services meaningfully contribute to a healthier future, a tech-enriched future or a sustainable future. We plan to build significant investments, influence, and presence in these sectors. It's probably worth saying that, you know, we don't anticipate that these will be exhaustive for all time. We will, of course, continue to build on the networks and insight generated from 20 years of doing this to evaluate new areas of opportunity.
Each of these themes is at that intersection of significant commercial opportunity, significant societal need, and also IP Group's USPs. These are quite wide themes, and so within each, we have particular areas of focus, and our managing partners are here to just briefly run you through those, and I'll start with Sam.
Thanks, Greg. In life sciences, our ambition is to develop cures for disease rather than simply trying to treat the symptoms of disease, which is what most current drugs do. We approach this along four simple lines. Firstly, we're investing in technologies that help us understand the underlying biology of disease. For example, we're invested in genetics through our holdings in, for example, Oxford Nanopore and Genomics plc, which are developing methods needed to mine and understand the human genome. As another example, we're invested in the human gut microbiome through our holding in Microbiotica Limited, which has developed methods for understanding the precise role of different gut bacteria in disease, particularly cancer.
We use the fundamental understanding of biology that these sorts of technologies give us to develop products that can reprogram, recondition, and redirect the way that cells, tissues, and patients themselves behave, so as to eliminate disease where it exists, but preferably and ultimately, to avoid the development of disease in the first place. With that, I'll hand over to Mark.
Thank you, Sam. The second of our thematic focus area is building a future that is enriched by technology. We have four thematic areas within that we are particularly focused on at present. The first of them is the application of artificial intelligence, particularly in the area of cybersecurity and financial technologies. There is a huge opportunity in that field. As we know, the damage done by cybercrime now is totaling $6 trillion every year. There's a huge opportunity, and we're well exposed to some good assets that are looking to address that problem. Second area of focus is on next-generation networks. Our current communications infrastructure today is not capable of supporting some of the use cases of tomorrow.
Things like virtual reality, augmented reality, vast networks of Internet of Things. We're investing both in the software layer and in the hardware layer in companies that are enabling new capabilities in our underlying communications networks. The third of our focus areas is the human machine interface. There's this fascinating evolution going on at the moment in the way that we interact with machines, and that's becoming a more human-like interaction. You may have seen from our annual report that we sold a very exciting company in this area, WaveOptics, during 2021, and we still have exposure to this sector through companies like Ultraleap in the portfolio. Finally, the final focus area within this deep tech theme is neuromorphic and quantum computing.
We have exposure to some early-stage assets that are developing the next generation of computing capabilities, that could add whole new capabilities to humankind and great new fields of capability there. Our next thematic, broad thematic focus area, the third thematic focus area is clean tech, where we have a long heritage of working in clean tech and a team with a great deal of expertise now. You know that to achieve net zero by 2050, our annual investment across the world in clean technologies will need to triple by 2030 to around $4 trillion. There's a huge impactful opportunity here, and IP is very well positioned to take advantage of that financial opportunity with the expertise that we have in-house and the experience of working in this area.
We have four broad themes within clean tech that we're focused on at present. We are, first of all, looking at novel approaches to generating renewable electricity and replacements for fossil fuels and across a variety of sectors. Secondly, we're focused on reducing fossil fuels and optimizing efficiency in the transport sector, which is a major contributor to global emissions today. We are focused on the area of greenhouse gas capture and storage, which will play a key role in achieving Net Zero. Finally, we're interested in the area of climate risk management, given the losses from natural catastrophes is accelerating and increasing and has reached its highest ever level of $500 billion, according to Swiss Re.
There's a huge opportunity in managing and characterizing that risk, and we're also focused on investing in assets in that area.
Thank you very much, Mark. Through this increasing sector focus, we're aspiring to be tackling some of the world's biggest problems, and we'll be seeking to build really meaningful category-leading businesses with at least billion-dollar company value potential. We intend to maintain influential holdings in these companies and as I said, increasingly focus capital and resource on them as they mature. We plan to highlight the likely valuation creation milestones for a number of them, so that shareholders and other stakeholders can better understand the key steps in the value creation journey. On this next slide, if it will transition. On this next slide, we're highlighting a handful of those, three in particular in this results presentation, one in each of our three focus areas.
You know, we think all of these businesses have billion-dollar company value potential by 2025. As part of our last analyst briefing last year, I remember highlighting Inivata, WaveOptics, and Ultraleap as companies to watch. You know, each of these enjoyed their various successes over the course of 2021. You know, we believe there'll be good progress in 2022 for these three businesses. If I take each in turn, Istesso, Featurespace and First Light, with a short video from each of the CEOs. First up is Lisa Patel, who's the CEO of Istesso.
Istesso is at the forefront of a new field of science called immunometabolism, and we're applying the science of immunometabolism to the treatment of autoimmune diseases. These are diseases that affect between 5%-10% of the world's population, and they carry an associated enormous health economic cost, as well as acting as a burden for patients. These diseases occur when the immune system attacks the body's own tissues, and examples of them are multiple sclerosis, where the attack is on the nerves, and diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, where the attack is on the joints. The consequence for patients of that is that they experience progressive disability. Although there are current treatments for these conditions, there's no real possibility for patients to actually resolve or recover from their condition in the long term. Our aim is really to solve that problem.
Our lead drug is called MBS2320, and it's a first-in-class treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases. What that means is that it's the first drug that actually acts in this way to improve the treatment of the condition of rheumatoid arthritis. MBS2320 is in phase II clinical trials, and because of the unique way in which it works, it offers four real benefits for patients. Firstly, it can control their symptoms. Secondly, it can stop the progression of their disease, so the underlying damage that occurs, in this case, to their bones. Thirdly, it actually preserves immunity. What this means for patients is that their body is able to continue to fight infections. That's something really illustrated in unmet needs in recent times because of the COVID pandemic and the need for patients to shield.
Finally, really uniquely for the patients, MBS2320 offers them the possibility to, ultimately, we hope, resolve their condition.
Thank you, Lisa. Here I set out the next important milestones for Istesso over the course of the coming few years. The key one there is the start of the phase IIb trial. Lisa mentioned that the company's in phase II. The next step is for them to enter their phase IIb for their lead asset in rheumatoid arthritis, and that will read out in early 2024. Over the course of that time, there may be some other assets entering into the clinic as well. Next up, we have Martina King, who is the CEO of Featurespace.
Hello, I'm Martina King, I'm the CEO of Featurespace, and it's a pleasure to join the IP Group's results presentation today. First of all, what are we here to try to do? Well, our job is to make the world a safer place to transact. That we have been able to achieve with our award-winning technology. We have invented adaptive behavioral analytics. We were the first company to bring recurrent neural networks to protecting payments across the world, and this is new technology that we have now patented. Our customers receive our technology and our groundbreaking analytics through the ARIC Risk Hub. When we were looking for our market fit, our customers or potential customers said, "Could you make sure your technology is better than what's gone before?
Then on top of that, could you make sure that you provide us with exemplary customer service? They're the two promises that we have kept our industry, and we have been rewarded for that dedication to technology advancement as well as deep customer service. If I talk about the progress therefore, commercially, that we've made, during the course of the last year, we've put on 68 new customers. Our financial progress has been record-breaking. We had our best new business year ever last year, our best year for recurring revenue. Our recurring revenue has grown by 75%. Our compound annual growth rate over five years has grown by 74%. Tremendous growth in all of our top line.
As far as the customer service is concerned, again, we have been able to achieve consistently an NPS score that's north of 60. That puts us into that world-class category. I'm really proud of the fact that we've been able to live up to that promise that we've made right at the early stages of getting our market fit. Where do we see our company in 10 years' time? Well, the great thing is there's still plenty of scope for solving the financial crime problem. Every analyst that we look at agrees the market has continued to be projected to expand. Over the next 5 years, about a GBP 8 billion market opportunity for us to go after. It's also not a one technology wins all as far as our market is concerned.
As you can probably tell from Martina's note there, the key milestones for this company are continuing their recurring revenue growth. When you know, the analysts that we look at as well talk about a huge growing market opportunity, at least 20% per annum, and Featurespace is aiming to outpace that growing market. Then finally, I'll Nick Hawker from First Light Fusion.
Hi, I'm Nick. I'm CEO of First Light Fusion. Our mission is solve the problem of fusion power with the simplest machine possible. Simplicity is a thread which runs through all of our technology. Our power plant concept is dramatically simpler. It can be built with existing technology, existing materials, existing supply chains. We neatly sidestep all of the or some of the big known engineering issues of fusion power. It also comes into the nature of the core technology as well. We're working on a new method for inertial fusion, which we call projectile fusion. We fire a high-velocity projectile, it flies for a short distance and hits into a target, and the target contains the fusion fuel.
The machine which launches the projectile is a lot simpler than what the mainstream of inertial fusion is proposing, which is a laser. It's much cheaper. The last piece of simplicity is actually when the projectile hits the target, the physics that happens then, the physics that takes place inside the target, that's simpler too, and that gives us a really crucial advantage, which is our process can be simulated and can be simulated accurately. That means we learn much faster in the simulations in silico than you ever would with physical experiments. Although, of course, the ultimate question is, are the simulations right? Working towards achieving fusion, that's the mission now, but we actually raised some more money at the start of this year, $45 million.
That's actually to get ahead and start on the next phase, which is building a new experiment, bigger, designed to show more energy out than in for the first time. We're already progressing into that next phase of demonstrating energy gain, and that is the crucial physics demonstration that's needed. It's not the only activity that we're gonna be starting in that next phase. We're actually gonna be really broadening out the work we're doing on the plant engineering, and the goal of the next phase is actually to get to a de-risked design for a power plant. That includes the GAIN experiment as the single biggest, most important thing, but it. There's lots of other detail which we'll be working through.
What that means is that the commercial opportunity for First Light starts at the end of that phase. It doesn't start. No, you don't have to wait all the way until the power plant is operating before you start to have a commercial opportunity, and potentially revenue opportunity.
As Nick said, the next milestone for First Light Fusion is that validated fusion reaction. You can see on here I've put between 2022 and 2023. This is right at the forefront of science, but we look forward to keeping you updated on progress over the course of the next year or so. Finally, as I mentioned at the start, Oxford Nanopore was the most material contributor to our results in 2021. Although share price performance has been affected by risk appetite and valuation pressure on high growth companies, which Nanopore definitely is, from a financial perspective, the company had an incredibly strong 2021 and issued three upgrades to their revenue guidance for 2021 post-IPO.
That most recent upgrade, which is what we show here, has noted expectations for their core life science research tools revenues to increase by more than 80% year-on-year to above GBP 120 million. The company will be announcing their maiden full year results next Tuesday, and we'll be looking for evidence of the continued revenue growth trajectory and traction in key areas such as Whole Genome Sequencing projects. Oxford Nanopore's in that category of companies which is delivering genuine real world impact.
You know, many of you will know that a significant proportion of the COVID-19 variants were sequenced on Nanopore machines, and there was a very interesting release in the past few weeks which, you know, aside from a Guinness World Record for fastest genome sequencing, outlined the rapid point of care genetic analysis that allowed for quicker and more successful treatments across a range of patient types. In terms of the impact for IP Group and our holding, you can see we invested GBP 77 million over the course of our involvement with Oxford Nanopore, and we've now realized GBP 106 million, and we have a 10% holding remaining. You heard Sam earlier talk about the fact that Nanopore sequencing is consistent with our Healthier Future theme, and it's around understanding the underlying biology of disease.
As a business, we want to ensure that where we help to create these successful industry disrupting companies, that we use that expertise and network to identify critical mass and build further. I think there's a real opportunity for us to do that with Nanopore and build around a core holding. Companies such as Microbiotica that Sam mentioned, they're based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, and I and the team plan to do more with Nanopore, and I hope to be able to update you on that more over the next year or so. In terms of our holding, we have significant experience and expertise with Nanopore and this space, and so with that knowledge, you know, we see great potential for Nanopore ahead.
We remain focused on our capital allocation, and of course, we will consider our holding over time in that light. Those are the leading companies that we believe will be creating meaningful impact and value within our three themes of healthier, tech-enriched and sustainable future. As I said at the start, this is all about unlocking value for shareholders, and I just want to cover that briefly. What do you get as a shareholder in IP Group? Well, you get public market liquid exposure to some of the most impactful technologies, and that's built around a deep thematic focus and presence, and also international expertise and networks. We don't think that this can be done without an international perspective and outlook, and that will enable us to deliver value.
You'll hear us talking about a number of businesses that have come through from our Australia business, and you'll have also seen in the results the fact that we have got additional capital from our partner Hostplus in Australia to really accelerate our businesses. We are seeking to build global leaders, and many of those will have the potential to scale above a billion in value. But we're not starting from scratch. You know, as I hope I've demonstrated today, we've got a very exciting portfolio of high growth companies, and our permanent capital structure enables flexibility to back those companies from inception all the way to scale, and we do intend to maintain influential shareholdings. Then finally, capital allocation to drive you know returns for shareholders.
We have a rigorous approach to this and, as you would expect, a rigorous investment appraisal process, and that's been built over 20 years. I hope that the buyback is a demonstration of our discipline and creating that tension between internal capital allocation and external, and we plan to use these tools again in the future. With that, I will pass to Dave, who's gonna take you through the results in a little bit more detail.
Hello everyone. Yeah, I'm David Baynes. I'm the Chief Financial and Operating Officer. I'm delighted to be with you today. As Greg mentioned at the beginning, we have got a complex business in terms of all the fascinating companies we have, but actually the financial structure is relatively simple, and I should be able to explain it to you in not more than maybe five or six minutes now. Three key things I wanna talk about is our return on NAV or really profit of about GBP 450 million. I'm gonna talk a bit about our NAV and our balance sheet, and I'm gonna talk about some components of that, the actual portfolio companies and the cash.
On the profit, well, you can see a very successful year for GBP 450 million, up from GBP 190 million the year before. Probably worth noting that actually the prior year, quite a lot of that, most of that, about GBP 160-170 million of that was actually achieved in the second six months, which means over the last 18 months, we have generated about GBP 600 million of profit across the group. Which if you put in perspective, was about our market cap about 2 years ago. So we've obviously had a very, very strong period. Now we do have to bear in mind how things have changed in the new year. Clearly, there is the squeeze on tech markets anyway, but then obviously there's geopolitical considerations in Europe obviously have affected share prices.
Pretty much all of our public market stocks have actually taken some kind of reduction in price in the last 2.5 months. Added up, that actually is a reduction of about GBP 264 million, of which the primary item is Oxford Nanopore, GBP 233 million. Obviously we'll have to see. They're difficult times to evaluate, but we'll have to see how these times work out. It's important to understand those changes at the moment have happened. Going back to our position is at the end of December, which obviously we're reporting to. If I look at the NAV, the NAV is up from GBP 1.3 billion to GBP 1.7 billion.
That's quite simple to understand really, 'cause that's the GBP 450 million less the amount we distributed. We distributed about GBP 50 million in dividends and share buybacks, so actually the overall increase on the balance sheet was less to about GBP 400 million uplift, which is what that is. The last things I'll come to a little bit more detail is just the cash. That again has strengthened during the period from a net position of just slightly over GBP 200 million to GBP 270 million. If I go over the page, I'll explain a little bit more about where that profit came from. We had an uplift across the group of nearly half a billion pounds, GBP 497 million pounds of uplift.
Now, of course, a big chunk of that was Oxford Nanopore, about GBP 300 million that which about GBP 80 million was at pre-IPO or at the time of the IPO, and the rest is post-IPO. That still left a considerable amount of uplift to the rest of the group. We had about GBP 200 million of uplift across the rest of the group. They're spread pretty widely, as you can see. You can see that the color-coded life sciences section there had 78, nearly GBP 80 million of uplift. If you look on the right, you can see the sort of companies it came from, Hinge Health and Inivata are contributing about GBP 62 million of that. The tech portfolio, similar uplift, so GBP 72 million uplift in the period.
Slightly more widely spread than that, WaveOptics, as we announced at the time, was acquired by Snap, one of the biggest deep tech acquisitions we're aware of at about GBP 500 million. That generated a GBP 27 million uplift. Also the business formerly known as Yoyo Wallet, SaltPay, that had an uplift of GBP 16 million. Featurespace, which we've talked about, had GBP 15 million. U ltraleap, our haptic touchless air touch technology company, that had an uplift of GBP 10 million as well. Quite widely spread across that portfolio. Green appropriately for cleantech, that was predominantly First Light Fusion, you can see there. First Light Fusion had a significant fundraising, about GBP 33 million, which announced in two chunks just before and after the year-end. That led to an uplift, so GBP 31 million.
Finally, the United States and Australia, the other parts of our business around the world, they also had very good years. Everyone had uplifts. Australia particularly strong. They more than doubled. They opened assets of that for about AUD 11 million to about AUD 23 million post uplift. A very strong period for them. If I then go over and look actually at the balance sheet itself, as I said, this is kind of where you see kind of the simplicity of the business. Here on the left, effectively, you have two key bits on our balance sheet. There's the portfolio and then there's cash. There is a small amount of a liability in debt.
We have a European Investment Bank loan of GBP 51 million as at the year-end, which will be paying down over about the next four years. Seventeen million we paid this year, seventeen million that we'll pay within the next two years. But as you can see, that's a pretty small gray line at the bottom there. The vast majority, obviously, we have is balance sheet, which has grown from 1.2 to 1.5 billion, and the cash I've already mentioned growing. If you look on the right there, you also get an idea of this is of all our balance sheets. So of all our balance sheet, Oxford Nanopore is at 31%. We can see some of these other companies we talked about, also significant components, Istesso, First Light Fusion, Featurespace, all there between 3%-5%.
Of course, cash is very important. I want to just touch on that, price per share. At the year-end, it was GBP 1.67 per share. Obviously, that has weakened from the numbers I've already explained. Down about 25 pence per share, so about GBP 1.42 now, but still well ahead of sort of about GBP 0.90 as we were this morning. We do still seem to be trading at a significant discount to net assets, which I'm sure people will ask some questions about later. Having looked at the balance sheet, we'll now just go on and look specifically at the portfolio, that GBP 1.5 billion that I touched on.
If you looked at it that way, we're not considering the cash or anything else at the moment, just the portfolio. When looked at like that, you can see that Oxford Nanopore is about 38%. That's just shy of 40% of our portfolio. Life Sciences is a significant portion at 30%, and deep tech at 15%. Cleantech is currently only 7%, but obviously had some exits in recent years. Obviously, as you've heard already, our plan is to invest more in that area, and you will see that expand. Also, both U.S. and Australia are growing fast. In terms of concentration there, the donut, if you like, on the right, we have...
We've always had a model that has quite a lot of companies 'cause that is part of identifying the best ideas and building them up over a number of years. We basically have 100 core companies by value on our balance sheet. Even at that, it's still relatively concentrated. The top 20 are 75% of the value. We have what we call other focus companies. It's another 22. We have a total of top 20 and other focus of 44. They make up 87% of all our value. Then everything else is only 13%. Although our model implicitly has quite a lot of companies, as we saw with all the most exciting technology, actually much of our focus, effort, and value is concentrated on a relatively small portfolio.
If I go over and look at the other big component of the balance sheet, which is the cash. Now, obviously, we can look at the statutory cash flow, which is sort of appears somewhat more complicated. Actually, again, this is a relatively simple story here. We started these growth cash positions at GBP 270 million of growth cash. We have overheads, net overheads of about GBP 19.5 million. We had a good year on income, and we were down on net overheads from GBP 21.5 million last year to GBP 19.5 million. We sort of anticipate that number will remain about going forward, something like about 1%-1.1% of overheads of our portfolio, I mean, of our net assets.
A number which we hope will remain about that level. The second big thing I've already mentioned, which is about GBP 17 million a year for the next few years at least of paying back our debt. Then after that, really it's pretty simple. There's the dividends and share buybacks to be done. It's actually only showing GBP 42 million here because of that GBP 50 million, a small amount of the share buyback was completed in January, about GBP 7.8 million. Then the two big ones really are investment, GBP 87 million. That's the number excluding actually what went into the estate, if we treat it separately, but GBP 87 million invested here in Australia.
Compared to that, obviously we had realizations of GBP 217, which is why we've actually strengthened over the year, even allowing for the other costs and overheads that we've seen. Perhaps then I'll do the last drill down, if you like, looking at that GBP 213 number, going over to the page. We can have a look at where that number came from. Just a few points I'd really like to make here. First of all, we've done well on exits in recent years. They've grown consistently over the past three years. You know, we've had a bigger exit every year, as you can see. Second point I'd like to make is it wasn't all Nanopore. It was spread relatively widely.
Oxford Nanopore of course continues at an extremely valuable GBP 84 million, which we took out at the time of the IPO. Inivata, which we sold to NeoGenomics, that donated GBP 64 million. WaveOptics, which is a part payment, there'll be more to come as sort of GBP 30 million more. Hinge Health, we took a small amount out of Hinge Health in that last significant fundraising. Then they were spread over a number of other companies as well. Fairly widespread. Second thing is the multiples are good. You can see that multiples anything sort of 6-7 times. Hinge Health exceptional because we came in very early and of course once you do something GBP 6.2 billion fundraise, obviously you get remarkable returns. Still across the board on these exits we've been getting very good returns.
The last point is actually it's encouraging to see that we're obviously carrying things at sensible values. If you look at the 213 realizations we had this year, they actually were GBP 82 million more than the price we were carrying those assets at the beginning of the year. They were carried at GBP 131 million. Which to some extent you'd expect if you float something, it's quite likely that the IPO is gonna be a higher price than the crossover round that you last done, perhaps you'd probably be valuing it at. Obviously it's considerably better than the alternative. Obviously, if we're in a situation where when we were selling things, we were selling them below and incurring losses, it would suggest we were overvaluing assets.
That clearly isn't the case. You can see in the prior year it was actually even more marked. In that prior year, the pre-money value was about GBP 108 million for the assets we sold for GBP 191. A significant sort of about 72.3% uplift from where they were. I think that's quite encouraging for how we're valuing things and obviously valuing things and what the value of our portfolio is going forward. With that, I'll hand back to Greg.
Thanks, David. Okay, so to wrap up before we move to questions, I guess to repeat the key messages that you've heard. You know, this. We've had a record year, and that has been built on two decades of doing what we do. I talked a bit about the evolving strategy. We'll give you more information on that over the course of this year and some of the specific initiatives that we will be looking at to really focus down on those thematic areas and those leading assets. You should start to see increasing behavior from us of allocating more of our capital into those leading companies. A good example of that was Bramble Energy, which completed a round. We did GBP 10 million of that round.
We were the lead investor and really putting conviction into a company that's in a space that we know very, very well. Of course, we'll continue to grow capital under management up 18% in 2021, but opportunities to do that in 2022 and beyond. You know, I will maintain sharp focus on shareholder value creation using that capital allocation approach that we have developed over the last couple of years and delivering return on NAV alongside cash returns. Then in terms of outlook, look, while difficult times may well lie ahead, we have the ambition to deliver far more impact and returns, you know, really make a dent in some of the world's big problems. Of course, ambition and drive is important, but it's not sufficient.
Importantly, I believe we have got the team, the experience, the expertise, the portfolio, and the capital to do this. On behalf of our portfolio companies and the current and future beneficiaries of the cures and the products and the services and the end users, thank you for providing the growth capital to enable them to deliver. It will be worth it, and I look forward to updating you on our progress over the course of this year and beyond. With that, I will have a look at the questions. Thank you everyone for sending in questions. First up, a question on will a copy of this presentation be posted on the company's website? Yes, absolutely. With that will be posted up today. Also we'll be using some of the
The video content that will be available for people to look at and using some of that through our sort of media channels. There's a couple of questions about discount and what that means from the point of view of specific things, specific initiatives to narrow the NAV valuation discounts. I'll let Dave speak to that one in a second. I guess there's a few elements to that. One is, we haven't really been out to talk about the portfolio beyond Oxford Nanopore. Understandably, a lot of focus of shareholder conversations has been around Nanopore pre-year-end.
I hope through this process and as we are continuing to deliver over the course of this year, investors will understand the valuation creation milestones. Of course, we've got to deliver progress in portfolio companies. In terms of the tools that we have to do that, we've got our capital allocation policy and framework. Of course, as we make further realizations, we'll continue to apply that policy, and we have the tools such as share buyback to be able to employ. Then David, do you want to just talk about a couple of the other-
Yeah. I mean, I sort of see almost from two sides, really. There's a kind of a tactical and strategic. At a tactical level, there are lots of initiatives we're gonna be doing. So as you've already heard, we're gonna. We'll talk a lot more, probably out in the public domain. We'll appear at more conferences, et cetera, et cetera. We're looking at those investors, for example, that maybe are not competitors, that have invested in us. We'll look at people that should invest in our sector and make sure we go and meet them. There's a lot of kind of tactical stuff we'll do. Obviously, strategic, as Greg has already spoken about, obviously one of the most important things is, I think, to communicate to the market.
There's a lot more to IP Group than Nanopore. Of course, Nanopore is a sensational company we're very proud of. As you begin to get a flavor today, there's sort of seven to 10 other companies which we believe will come through with significant value in the not too distant future. I think part of it's important that our messaging is out there to explain that, to explain the other things we've talked about today. Also we will be doing more shareholder activity, as we've talked about, in terms of things like, you know, continuing to grow our dividend policy and continue to review our share buybacks. We are very focused at both ends, I'd say, of the equation at that discount.
Because, I'm sure we find it as puzzling, quite frankly, and also frustrating as I'm sure a lot of our shareholders do. We're very focused on it and plan to do as much as we can to obviously reduce that discount.
Yeah. That covers it. There were a handful of comments on that point on discount and share price. You know, we will definitely be on the front foot this year and investing in our IR activities as well to ensure that the story is well understood. Clearly, that's part of the role of the leadership team, is to ensure that that story is as well understood and people understand those clear valuation milestones. There's a question around, does the thematic focused approach mean IP Group will do less early stage or spin-outs? In the annual report, we set out a number of the new things that we've done this year. I mean, the simple answer to that is no.
I might ask Mark and Sam to just talk about how they are thinking about early stage pipeline and the new things that we've done this year. Perhaps Mark to start, please.
Certainly. Yes, the answer is no. We're still actively looking at new opportunities and actively backing new opportunities. We've done three or four new things in the past sort of two or three months. We've done a couple of Oxford spin-outs in the area of next generation computing, one of the areas I was talking about, and also a couple of clean tech investments. No, we're very active on the technology side.
To add to that, we're very active in sort of early stage investing. Our sources don't have to be university partners or universities in general. We can also source from industry, which we have looked at a number of opportunities. I'm pleased to say, actually, just this morning we closed the first very early stage investment of 2022. A novel approach to the treatment of cancer. We're very active in the early portfolio.
Let's have a look then. There's one. Hi, team. Looking at your funding round schedule for 2022 and your current cash balance, does it make sense for us to assume more capital deployment than last year? I think it's fair to assume that we're mindful of the short-term environment here. The plan would be to deploy at least as much capital into the portfolio as we did in 2021. Of course, there are some, you know, relatively unprecedented times that we're living through at the moment in terms of, you know, the geopolitical situation. We do think there are significant opportunities for us to accelerate those leading companies that I had up on the thematic slide over the course of this year.
I think it's safe to assume at least as much as 2021. We will obviously keep an eye on how the current conditions play out. One for Mark and Sam on investments this year. Has relatively lower early stage funding availability due to market conditions helped you invest at more favorable valuations in your view, or has that not filtered down yet?
I would say it hasn't quite started filtering down yet, but I do expect that it will. I mean, I think the good news is in my sector, particularly for example, biotech, although the public markets are suffering, the private markets still remain strong, and vibrant, and there's still a lot of deals being done between pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, even early-stage biotech companies. The level of activity in the private markets has actually not particularly dropped off. That's good news, but also it means we haven't yet been able to take advantage of sort of discount pricing. I'm sure that will filter through in the next few months.
Yeah. A very similar answer from me.
One for you, Mark, on the clean tech holdings, have you been seeing increasing interest potentially followed by accelerated commercialization for any of your clean tech holdings as part of a global effort to reduce Russian oil dependency?
Yes. Perhaps not directly to reduce our Russian oil dependency because the acceleration of interest in this sector predates that. I would say since the beginning of last year, we've seen a huge renewed interest in the area of clean tech and particularly with COP 26 drawing a lot of attention to it last year as well. Presumably the desire to reduce the dependence on Russian oil will also influence that and reinforce it as well. That definitely creates opportunities to accelerate commercialization with some of our companies, and we are actively working on initiatives to do that and have begun to put those into process for several of our clean tech assets.
Thanks, Mark. Sam, one for you. Regarding the number two holding Istesso, can you give us a quick overview of the phase IIb trial for MBS2320, and what does success look like? Has the trial started yet, or when is that anticipated? Is the plan to self-fund the trial?
The trial will start imminently, and there's a lot of regulatory activity going on in the background to support that. The trial, it's quite a big study. The simplest way to think of it is as an expansion of the phase IIa study that sounds like the person asking the question is familiar with. In this study, we will be looking at different doses of the drug, and the reason for that is that we want to identify the lowest possible dose that has the maximal efficacy, 'cause clearly that will have two impacts. A, give us a very safe dose, and secondly, give us a dose that is cheaper to produce, so improve our margins.
We actually think of it as quite a de-risk study because the phase IIa, if we can reproduce what we did in the phase IIa but in this larger population, and there was more statistical powering in the study, et cetera, that will give us, we think, a very good chance of success. Really in many respects, this is a trial that is, it's something we have to do and part of the developmental pathway to get to a lower dose. But we expect the trial to work. It's going to be recruiting over 200 patients, so it's, you know, this is a quite a big study in a number of different territories. I hope that answers the question.
I don't know that we'll get a note to say, yes or no, but, yeah, looks like it is. Another question here. Can you please indicate with the current top 20 holdings expected capital call for IP Group not to be diluted, do you need the GBP 250 million cash balance for this? I mean, the answer is we have a number of places that we seek to allocate capital with the strategy that we've outlined, and the way that we'll apply our capital allocation policy would mean that a significant proportion of that will go into those, top, not necessarily top 20 holdings, but those conviction holdings, that I outlined, earlier in the presentation.
You'll see that over the course of this year that an increasing proportion of our cash will go into those companies. That being said, you know, we do still need to ensure this is a sustainable business, and the idea is to have both focus and diversification across companies and across themes, because different themes come in and out of fashion and investor appetite. There's a comment here. What are the plans to divest the 10% stake in Oxford Nanopore further this year, perhaps if the prices are back to GBP 7 or above? I mean, clearly we think the company at GBP 7 or above is a lot better than at GBP 4 or GBP 5.
At the moment, I guess I'd refer back to that earlier comment that we made. You know, we will have a great understanding of the business. We will look for, first of all, for guidance from the company on their sort of short-term plans, and we will use that capital allocation approach to balance you know sort of reducing that holding in Oxford Nanopore with the opportunities that we have to both invest capital into exciting businesses and return to shareholders a portion of that as we've demonstrated over the last year. In terms of another question here. After record years for full year 2020 and full year 2021, how cautious or optimistic are you about full year 2022 to now? I mean, crikey, that's crystal ball gazing.
I mean, in terms of the capital markets, clearly things are very volatile. In terms of the larger companies that we have got the most, you know, they particularly the three companies that we've shown you today, you know, we are very confident that those companies are gonna make material progress over the course of the next 12-18 months. Of course, the macro environment can have an impact on the valuations of those businesses. But what we tend to see is through the cycle, that it's more the progress made by the companies that's driving the valuation with an overlay of the macro than the other way around for our businesses. I would say we're definitely cautiously optimistic, and definitely on the progress that those companies can make.
Let's have a look at that one for me. There's a question here, is there a danger that the company is spreading its skills too thinly over three different, three very different growth markets? Would it not be better to direct its financial and/or technical firepower on a small, more concentrated portfolio, a strategy followed by successful private equity investors like HgCapital Trust? I think I mean, there's clearly an important thing here around scale. You know, we've spent quite a number of the last 10, 15 years trying to build IP Group to the sort of scale where we can offer liquidity to our shareholders in the form of a stock that you can actually trade. We believe in order to do that, we need to be at least up in the billions valuation.
A smaller approach, dividing the business up would have a couple of things. Firstly, it would mean that you'd create smaller, less liquid companies that would be less attractive to companies and investors around the world. The second is there are genuine platform benefits to having those three broad thematic areas. You know, we want to have deep understanding, deep presence, deep focus in each of those areas. You'll see, for example, over the course of this year, we plan to have, you know, a sort of renewed presence on the clean tech side.
Having those things together under one roof means that you can access greater pools of capital internationally, you can benefit from networks greater internationally, and some of the insights around building companies, taking companies through funding rounds, IP, and the way that businesses protect their IP and develop commercial relationships with companies around the world. All of those things have benefits to being a larger organization focused on those three thematic areas. Don't forget, we've been doing this across very broad areas, and this is more of a narrowing and a sharpening of what we've done in the past with a more deliberate focus. We believe that's the best way to accelerate those companies and to accelerate value. There's a question for Sam specifically.
Could we have an update, please, on Artios?
Yes, sure. That's a very promising company in the field of developing novel treatments for cancer, coming back to what I spoke about earlier in terms of trying to find cures for disease. Things are going very well. You will have probably seen that last year, the company raised a very significant funding round with a number of new life science U.S. life science funds coming into the company. It's very well supported now. It's extremely well-funded. The company now has two of its novel agents in phase I clinical studies, so we would expect data over the next, I imagine, 12-18 months, I think is about the right timeline, which could provide some evidence of efficacy.
You know, I think things are looking extremely positive for the company.
Thanks, Sam. Quite a good question on why continue to hold a small stake in Hinge Health when it does not reflect your criteria for an influential stake that has significant value to be deployed elsewhere or return to shareholders? I guess sort of like, probably more a question for Sam, but from my perspective, when that company completed their last funding round last year, we took the opportunity to take some capital off the table, and perhaps give you an you know, an indication of how we're thinking about that company. Sam, jump in to talk a bit more about that Hinge.
No, I think we're aligned with the sort of sentiment behind the question. I mean, we're very happy to be in a rapidly, you know, very fast-growing company. The company's revenue growth is quite phenomenal. That said, you know, we recognized at the end of last year that health tech valuations got quite full, one might argue. We took money off the table as much as we could in that round, and we're very much attuned to the notion that we would, you know, potentially take money off the table if and when and as the opportunity arises in companies like this where, you know, we're not. It's not a strategic stake. We're not on the board, we don't have strategic input.
Yeah, I think we're sort of aligned with the sentiment behind that question.
Yeah. Thank you. I was just conscious we're now at 11 o'clock. I will. There's a couple more questions on here. Have there been any major changes to your shareholder register over the last year? We include that as an appendix in our results presentation as we always do. When that's up on the website you can have a look at the current state of the register. I mean, the short answer is there haven't been any major additions or removals from the top sort of 10-12 holders, although within those holders there's been some movements up or down, you know, by 1% or 2%.
We'll disclose that as we usually do in an appendix to this presentation. Another one here. Interesting to note, you'll be looking to leverage increasing levels of third-party capital managed by the group. Can you elaborate on this and in which areas of the portfolio you envisage being able to deploy it? Is it likely to be by thematic area or by region? I think in the—I mean, the obvious short-term opportunities are, you've just seen us announce the updated and increased relationship with Hostplus. That's an international portfolio there, so that's investing in both Australian companies, but primarily in growth companies across the world.
I think the types of investors who are interested in that sort of product do want to have access to the most interesting and compelling growth opportunities internationally. Then there is a regional one, though, however, so that our China business, we have an office in Hong Kong, and we have a relationship with China Everbright, and the idea there is to form a fund, and that will happen over the course of this year. And that will be for investing in essentially joint ventures or operations of existing portfolio companies who want to enter into the China market. That is a geography-specific one.
We'll do a bit of both, and of course, we'll continue to grow our business in Parkwalk, which you know remains the leading EIS fund provider and for growth capital in the U.K. Conscious of time. I think we've covered all of the major themes and questions. I think if any shareholders believe that we haven't, then you know, we're very open to feedback and challenge. Please do drop us a line on the IR email address that's on the website, and we'll of course endeavor to get back to you. But I will just say thank you all very much for your support and also for your time today.
You know, I do genuinely believe there is a really significant opportunity here to deliver both value and impact through the portfolio. You know, we have the team, we have the expertise to do this, and we're in a good capital position that will enable us to accelerate those key businesses. With that, I'll wrap things up and look forward to updating you all again soon. Many thanks.