We have been doing the same thing for almost 30 years. We are trying to relabel microcap as a public venture. Microcap, I know it's not a bad name here, but in the securities industry, microcap has always been challenged. When we say public venture, I would say it's highly curated public venture. In other words, we are not doing a deal a week. We are focused on launching meaningful companies, and that's what we have been doing for a long time. We recently went public two years ago. When you look back at our history, we looked at how did our companies do. We have only launched about 17 companies this way, and they have done pretty well. We said maybe we can scale this up. This story is about scale. Can we go from one company every 18 months to maybe three or four a year?
We are pretty excited that we are going to be able to do that. Anybody that's been in the microcap space knows that it's been a rough last 25, 20, 30 years. We have gone from 7,300 public companies to 4,300 public companies. I think there's a lot of reasons for it that I could spend a lot of time talking about, but we all know it. Anybody that's been investing in the space, I noticed that when I came here, I haven't spoken at a conference in a long, long time. Coming here, I noticed that everybody was a lot older. I saw some old faces I hadn't seen in 20 years. I go, oh, hell, you're older. There's no young people here, right?
We need to bring young people into this business, and we need to get them excited, and we need to get young companies going public again. I think that the structural issues that have caused that, we are solving at MDB Capital Holdings, and I'm pretty excited about it. The other sort of macro thing that I'm excited about is what's happened is so many of these companies stayed private because it was easier, cost less, et cetera. Private equity emerged as a huge asset class. Traditional venture guys raised trillions of dollars or whatever, but they didn't perform. Nobody made any money. If you go to all these RIA conferences and family office conferences, people like Goldman Sachs furrowed away 30% of people's assets in these private assets. Why? Because they made more fees. It was a popular thing.
If you talk to family office conferences now that you talk to them about a private equity fund, they're going to burn you at the stake. Buying into a traditional venture fund or a private equity fund is like drinking battery acid. They're all locked up. They're not getting returns. We've been talking to them about public venture, and they're like, wow, we never heard of this. Nobody's ever heard of public venture. I'm pretty excited about it because we're getting a great reception with investors that we've never had a relationship with. Part of that market starvation that's also super interesting, we're taking a company public here, Buddha Juice. They've presented here. What's exciting is it's a friend that came to me and he says, hey, I'm going to do a private equity deal. We said, why don't you look at going public?
We were trying to figure out how to value the company. We did a screen of companies under $300 million in market cap earning at least $1 million and growing at least 10% a year. There were 34 companies. There's nothing left. What does that mean? Those companies that are profitable are trading at good valuations, better valuations than what private equity can pay now. I think we're going to see a huge number of companies that would normally have gone a private equity route are going to go public because it makes sense. We got to help them understand that we can manage these things. It's not going to be a lot of money to go public. You can find an accountant that's not going to charge you $1.5 million a year. You can find a lawyer that's going to take you public for a reasonable price.
You're going to be able to do this, and it's going to make sense for you and your stakeholders. We have this great platform to basically launch big ideas. We've traditionally focused in deep tech. All 17 companies we had taken public before Buddha Juice, none of them had any material revenue, and none of them were profitable. This is our first profitable IPO that we've ever taken public. We have this expertise in IP, and we own our own IP law firm that we started in Arizona. That's a whole other story that we could do a whole other presentation about. It's a critical strategic asset for standing up deep tech companies. If they're not going to be a leader in their space, how do you go public without being a leader? You can't trade at a material market value unless you're leading a new technology revolution.
We're experts at doing that and figuring out how to do that. The other thing we did was we set up our broker-dealer to be able to develop these companies and sort of be a one-stop shop. We are a self-clearing firm. You're not going to meet any broker-dealer here that self-clears. You can go to MDB Direct, open up. It's a great app for trading, whatever else. We can onboard thousands of accounts. We're geared up to figure out how to get those accounts from Robinhood and all the young people that aren't participating in this market currently. We're set up to be able to onboard those people once they get excited about these new ideas that are coming out. I think we have a really unique platform from a broker-dealer perspective. We've got a great community of investors.
A lot of the people here, jeez, I haven't seen for, like I said, decades. These are people that really believe in dreams, and they believe in lifting these companies and helping these companies. We have a great group of those people, but we're onboarding new people and kind of spreading the religion of public venture. What we do at PatentVest is really build leadership. We build an IP moat around it. Again, it's a whole other presentation, but it creates that leadership that's enabled us to create billion-dollar market caps for companies with no revenue. That's where, as shareholders of MDB Capital Holdings, we've made all of our money as partners of MDB before we went public and how people will make money going forward as shareholders of MDB. Again, I talked about our broker-dealer. It's really great. Anybody that has issues trading microcap, come over to us.
You're not going to have a lot of rigmarole like you will because some broker-dealer clears through a big company, and they scrutinize the fact that you're buying a $2 stock or whatever else. We have no issues. As long as you're not a criminal and you're a good person, we're a great place to come in and invest in microcap. Our community is so much different. When you look at all the investment banks that are out there and other people that are taking companies public today, who do they deal with? They deal with the usual, we call the usual suspects. They're hedge funds. These are people that do structured deals. They throw warrants on them. They really are predatory against these small public companies. We've excommunicated those kind of people. They don't live in our community. They're not welcome in our community. We deal with investors.
We don't deal with traders, and we don't deal with those kind of people. We have a great group of people. It's getting stronger every day, and I'm really proud of the relationships we've developed over. I've been in this business for 40 years now, but we have a great group of people. Why did we go public? It's really because of this slide right here. We've taken 17 of these companies public that we kind of co-created with entrepreneurs and inventors and universities where we'd spin out technology, create a company. When we look back at our track record, we said these were ideas that nobody else would finance. To have 30% of them hit billion-dollar market values meant that our process must be pretty darn interesting to be able to make that happen.
For 60% of them to hit $500 million or greater tells you that these companies got launched. They were able to raise plenty of capital. We never had a company that we backed that didn't go public. We've sold 100% of our IPOs. We've never had an IPO that we went to go do that we didn't sell. We've got a 100% hit rate. If you look back at those $5 billion things, I'm not sure, to be honest with you, that we would fund any of them ever again. If they were to come back in the door, we would redo them. I would tell you that the quality of what we're doing today is much better than what we've done historically. Why? Because we're older and we're smarter.
Our team, our analyst team, if you guys bring any companies to our analyst team, you're going to be so impressed by our team. They are so smart. They are so helpful. You will learn so much about our process by just bringing a company to us. You'll find out why we have this kind of track record. Our stock has not done so well. We kind of went public at kind of the worst time. Our current market cap is $35 million. I'm not going to tell you to go out and buy our stock because all it's going to do is put more pressure on me as a CEO to perform. If it stays low, I know I shouldn't be saying this, but the stock staying low is not a bad thing.
What it means, though, is that if you invest in MDB, you get priority access to all of our IPOs. Why? It's not some gimmick. It's because we want long-term investors in our IPOs. If you're an underwriter, you want somebody that's committed to that company, that believes in the process, that believes that we're standing up leaders. The real reason to own MDB is that you're going to get priority access to all of our transactions. It hasn't been so valuable the last two years, but if you go back before that, we would have people waiting in line to get our IPOs. I mean, it was very hard to get our IPOs historically. I think that the other point I would make is that we have portfolio holdings not only in eXoZymes.
If eXoZymes goes to a billion-dollar market cap, that's $40 a share in value for an MDB shareholder, and the stock trades for like $4 or under $4. We also own a self-clearing broker-dealer. We tried to buy one before we went public, and the one we were looking at buying sold for $60 million, and it had all kinds of regulatory problems. Our clearing firm is worth something. I'm not saying we're going to run out and sell it tomorrow, but it is worth something. Our law firm, we have a very unique asset in our law firm. It's starting to grow its revenues. It's headquartered in Arizona. There's a whole story of how non-lawyers can own law firms.
Google it, put it into Grok or AI or whatever, and say, what is the advantage of owning an Arizona law firm that's in IP that could go public, could be the first public IP law firm? We've announced we're going to be spinning that out as a public company. What it trades at, I can't tell you, but it's got a lot of headroom. It could be very exciting. What do you pay for our ability to create billion-dollar value companies out of thin air? What's that worth? I don't know what it's worth, but it's worth a lot more than what we're trading at right now. I do think this is the first time we've presented at a conference. It's the first time we've talked about the stock, but I think it's a really interesting opportunity. We build our companies to last.
Leadership development is critical to building market value. You want to be a leader. You don't want to be a follower. There's no reason to go public if you're not a leader. In my mind, why go public if you're not going to be a leader? You're going to trade for a low multiple. It doesn't make sense. We're all about creating leadership. You'll see that even with Buddha Juice, which is not a deep tech company. They are going to be the leader in the ultra-fresh juice space, which is a whole new category that has never existed broadly in supermarkets. We wouldn't be taking Buda Juice public if we didn't believe they're going to be the leader in a new category that doesn't exist. Our team is curating for that. This is what they do. They look through thousands of ideas every year.
I challenge you to bring in your companies and have our team look at them. They do a great job of turning over rocks. It is a numbers game. We found out as we hired and trained more analysts, we have a whole analyst training program. As we hired and trained more analysts, we got more companies. Our pipeline, we used to do one company every 18 months. I'm now highly confident we're going to be able to do three or four a year. If you start looking at the economics of doing three or four big ideas a year, in addition to taking companies like Buda public, which we act more as like an underwriter and not so much as a co-founder, you're going to see, I think, that this could get very dynamic. A big area of focus right now is metabolic health.
It's the biggest problem on the planet. It's bigger than AI and crypto put together. It's massive. As we saw with the emergence of GLP-1s, it is the biggest problem. 80% of health care costs are caused by the epidemic of diabetes and obesity, etc. We're trying to address it. We have three unbelievable things in the pipeline that you guys should take a look at and will be launching. I think these are all billion-dollar plus companies in the making. Very excited about it. It's a great area of focus for us. I think it's going to really pay off. Join our public venture revolution. Submit your big idea. Like I said, you can go to the website, click on Submit Your Big Idea. If you have any ideas, please send them in. We'll tell you real quickly. We'll tell you, does it fit? Does it not fit?
Just remember, we want to stand up leaders in new technology categories. We don't want me-too things. We want big ideas. When you guys run into them, we'd love to build a relationship with you. We have the ability to partner, incentivize people that bring us good stuff. We're not a one-way plate. We want to build relationships. Take advantage of it. Take a look at MDBH. I think once you own SOC, you're part of the club. You get to participate in all of our companies or join our investor community. Take a look at what we're curating and what we're developing. I think you'll find them interesting. Thanks. Any questions?
Wasn't there, in all the companies you had, you take stakes in all of them?
Every company we have equity interests in. It depends on really how much time we have to spend. If we license something out of a university, and we create a company around it, we're going to own a big chunk of it. Like with Buda , who the CEO is right here, if we stand them up effectively, he had never learned how, he'd never taken a company public. He didn't have financial models put together. He didn't have the whole story, which we're great at putting all that together. We work together, but it's not as much work. We met on that, we started talking. We've known each other for a long time, but we talked about it last Thanksgiving. In less than a year, we put this together. We get paid like an underwriter, but we do have warrants.
We do have some equity participation in the upside of the company. It ranges based on the level of involvement. One other thing I would say is that we're pretty capital-light. As these things mature, we are a publicly traded LLC, and we will distribute out excess cash to the shareholders. Anthony and I are the largest shareholders. We like distributions just like any other shareholder does. That's kind of how we operate. Back there, you had a question?
That was actually my question.
Oh, OK.
As a publicly traded LLC, do you pay distributions on tax?
Yeah, so you'll get a K-1 if you're a member. We don't want people to have a bunch of income and not have a distribution. We've got to pay tax just like anybody else. Yes, there are tax advantages to what we do, a number of them. One, as you get a dividend, in theory, it reduces your basis. To some degree, it's tax advantaged. The other major aspect of everything we do, every company we've done qualifies for QSBS 1201. For any of you that don't know about QSBS 1201, it's the most amazing thing that I'm still surprised that people at this conference have never heard of. If you don't know much about it, you need to learn about it because every one of our companies qualifies. You don't have to pay the tax.
If you hold the stock for five years, you have the ability to roll it over. If you hold it shorter than five years, then you're another qualifying company. 100% of our companies qualify for 1201. That's a huge advantage to what we do. I think it's also resonating with the sort of family office community. I think it's a big factor of why they like what we do because not only do you get 1201, but you get liquidity. When they go into a venture fund or something else, there's issues with it. It's another kind of cool aspect of what we do. Yes?
Thank you. The capital markets for small cap IPOs have slowed down a lot in the last five years because of interest rates, other factors. Has that affected deal liquidity or anything like that on your platform?
Yeah, no, it's been horrible. I mean, COVID, we had a bump. We had some life science companies. We had a bump. Several more companies went to billion-dollar market caps during that time frame. It was really good. Right after that, it got really bad. The last three years have been probably the worst three years I've witnessed since we've been doing this. It's been horrible. It really called into question, I mean, I can tell you that we were like, jeez, why the hell are we in this business? Anybody that's been at this conference knows that, that's been invested in the space. I think it's coming back. I'm super optimistic that we're in a great time for this. Again, a lot of these things are cyclical. What you see now is you're seeing foreign companies that are trading at lower valuations than the U.S. companies.
You're going to see a lot of new companies coming public, in my opinion, in the U.S. because there's just a small quantity of these companies. They're scarce, and people want liquidity. I just think, again, it's been a long horrible cycle over that last 20, 30 years. I think my opinion is it's turning for the first time in a long time. I'm optimistic.
In terms of new ideas and opportunities, is that exclusively prior to public, or would you ever work with an existing microcap recapitalization?
Yeah, so we have a company in our portfolio called HeartBeam, which went public through another small underwriter. Our analyst team reviews every small public company that's out there under $300 million in market value or even $500 million. I have to tell you, it's pretty slim pickings out there for us to find stuff. We came to the conference, and we said, OK, what things here might fit? I think there were eight companies that we were interested in seeing here. Yes, we do is the answer. HeartBeam, it's a great story. They came in. I think they were very reactive to we looked at their technology at its core and said, wow, these guys are doing something very fundamentally different than anybody in the ECG space. We can reposition this company for success. We did it. We've raised $35 million for them.
They're hopefully on the doorstep of FDA approval of something that could be a multi-billion dollar kind of opportunity at some point. Yes, HeartBeam is a great example. Take a look at it. It's a really interesting company. The symbol is BEAT. I don't think we have any other public ones out there other than the ones we've launched. If there's a great public company, submit it. Call us up. We'd love to look at it if you. Anybody else?
How long once you do company public, how long do you guys typically hold the company? Or do you just have like a portfolio of companies that you take public and still remain?
Yeah, I would say our job is to launch them. We're a launch pad, and we want them to be taken away from us as fast as possible. We recognize that we wait for them to mature. They have to mature. Sometimes they're fast, sometimes they're slower. I always tell people I'm not smart enough to own a billion-dollar market cap company because too many things can go wrong when you get to a billion-dollar market cap. It's hard to say. I would say that we wait for them to mature, and then once they get up to several hundred million dollar market caps or above, they're mature. They don't need us anymore. They can raise money all they want on their own. We still mentor them and talk to them, and sometimes they ask for advice, but most of the time they don't.
They go off, they grow up, and they leave the fly the coop. Anybody else? All right, thank you so much for listening.