We have Chris Marlett with MDB Capital.
All right. I'm going to try and buzz through this pretty quick, leave time for questions, because what we do is a little bit different. Not just a little bit different, a lot different from most companies you've seen, especially most public companies. I don't know. This is our latest tagline that I don't really love that much, "We take the future public," but we're trying to get people to understand what we do. What we really do is we take what we believe are meaningful companies and build them. We're really entrepreneurs that masquerade as investment bankers. We should probably take capital out of our name and just say, MDB or something.
I realized very early in my career that if you're a leader in a new business or technology category, you're meaningful in the public markets, whether you're early stage, late stage, doesn't really matter. We've been doing this for 30 years. I've been doing it my whole life, 40 years of selling dreams effectively. The good news is a lot of the dreams have come true. We're very proud of our track record. We're proud of our team. We've built a really great team of people, and we've launched some great companies that have done meaningful things. This really tells the story of our company, MDB Capital. A lot of these are scientists, entrepreneurs, who come to us with something that they think can change the world. We look through a lot of these. Our analyst team does a great job.
What we realized is that in deep tech, which is where we do most of our work, that IP is really the core asset, because if you don't own the space, you're not going to be sustainable. A lot of these companies that are out there, they might have a great idea, but if it's a technology company, you better own the IP, and we're experts at that. We've launched now 18 companies we've taken public over the years, and we've verticalized as an operation to really help these companies. Anybody that's been in the microcap space like I've been for my whole life is that it's been super difficult, right? We've gone from 25 years ago, we had 8,000 public companies. We're down to 4,000 public companies, and it ain't getting better. This conference, I don't know what we're going to do.
It's got to be Planet something or other because there aren't many microcaps left. We've been creating these big idea companies, launching them in through this microcap sort of process, and we build a platform to do that. We have two other, what we think are meaningful companies that we've built underneath MDB, our core business of positioning these companies. One's called Public Ventures, which we became a full self-clearing platform because we see that investors are changing, right? We saw what happened with crypto. We saw what happened with meme stocks. There's a whole new generation of young investors. Most of them aren't here, right? We need to bring more people into the microcap space. The problem is Pershing and NFS and all these big clearing platforms, they don't care about microcap at all. They don't care about microcap.
We said, "Well, jeez, we have to have a distribution platform." We went through, as we call it, the brain damaged for 5 years to build this thing, to get through FINRA and DTC and what have you. You're not going to see any of these other investment banks out here that have real clearing platforms, right? That have this ability to do this. We've built it. You can go to MDB Direct, what have you. We're going to partner with somebody because we launch a few companies a year. This needs to be launching hundreds of companies a year if we're going to bring back the microcap space. We're going to be spinning that out. We're going to partner with somebody. We're in active discussions to do that. We're excited about it. It's another one of our big idea companies, if you will.
The other thing that we learned was that IP law was a very dysfunctional process, very expensive for these small deep tech companies. We built our own IP law firm through the state of Arizona, which enables non-lawyers to own a law firm. Now what's happening with AI and how the practice of law is changing, we're disrupting how these small companies can get IP and really own the markets they're in. We're going to be spinning that out as a new independent company, too. We're really excited about it. Javier, who's CEO of the company, is going to be talking about it here in the next presentation. Hope you guys stick around to see it because it's going to be another meaningful company.
Really when you look at MDB, we're a collection of meaningful companies, that some people think is an investment bank. This is the problem right here, right? Again, microcap has been brutal, right? It's been super brutal. If you look, this is the last 12 months. If you're under $300 million in market cap, you look stupid compared to SpaceX, right? Or whatever, right? The market is now becoming increasingly concentrated in big cap names. There's probably now 15 companies that make up 50% of the total equity value of the public markets. We have to build. Like this conference, there's an existential crisis. Unless we build a platform to launch these things in a more rational way, this is not going to be good. You're also going to see Buda Juice, which we took public, which is right after PatentVest.
Buda Juice's old friend, Horatio, and he's building something that's going to define a big category and create a big business. It's not deep tech, it's not IP, but the same principles apply. He's going to be a leader in a new, huge category, and he's going to disrupt it, and it's a meaningful company. That's what we stand for. We didn't take Amazon or Tesla public, but this is public venture, right? They went public with big, audacious ideas. Everybody said, if you're old enough to remember when the Amazon IPO went out, everybody says, "Well, if online selling ever becomes big, Walmart's going to crush them," right? Tesla, every hedge fund in Dallas was short Tesla when it came public. Oh, electric cars make no sense, right?
They were able to basically take an audacious idea, a founder who could sell it, and the market that priced the future. We saw it this last week with SpaceX. Public venture has been around forever. There was 1,000 radio companies that went public in the early 1900s. If you remember the internet boom. Public markets are the best place to sell dreams, and we're just curating the best ones. We're trying to curate the best ones. These are all the things if I'm pitching a company or an entrepreneur or an inventor that we're co-founding a company with, because that's generally how we operate. We put in our money, and then we have a full stack to take them public. This is the benefits versus doing a private equity deal.
When Horatio was looking at going public, he says, "Well, I think I'm going to do a private equity deal." I said, "Well, how many people do you know that have done private equity deals that love their private equity guy," right? You're going to have some young guy telling you how to run your business, and you're not going to build your dream, right? Build it independently in the public markets, and that's exactly what he's doing. Obviously for investors, I don't really like investing in private companies because the optionality of being public is great. All of you are here at this microcap conference because we're all trying to find the next big winner. The good news is that they're not always completely liquid. Sometimes they trade by appointment. It's way better than being private.
What's happened is that traditional venture and traditional private equity has sucked all the air out of the room. That's what's happened the last 25 years. What we're banking on at MDB is that's going to change, that it ain't going to be like that anymore because it doesn't make sense. It makes sense for a Buda Juice to go public, right? We're trying to make that happen. Again, we're not an investment bank per se, even though we perform some of the functions of an investment bank. What we really do is we take stuff that nobody wants to put money in, and we make them investable. That's really what we do, is we really see things other people don't see, which is this asymmetric upside that exists, right?
Then we frame it in such a way, and we help them to build it. In the case of IP, which is really important in deep tech, we actually build the whole strategy and the business strategy, and we tell the story, and we stay with it. We own these companies. Our balance sheet is a collection of these big ideas. This is what we do in the process. It's a full stack. I think that the full stack is we have a lot of things going on, and hence why we're spinning out Public Ventures and PatentVest so that we can really build those independently of what we do, which is the core business of curating and building these big ideas. Everything we do is QSBS, which is another kind of cool aspect of what we do.
If you're looking for QSBS big ideas, everything we do is QSBS, which I really love, and I've paid a lot less taxes as a result of that. What do we look for in case you see things that are out there that you want to bring to us? What we really look for is foundational IP. We have the ability to tell you very quickly whether or not we can own the space because we have experts. If you have an idea, don't go putting money in a deal that's a tech deal without calling us. Just call us. We'll give you a free opinion of it. We'll tell you exactly whether or not this company can be a leader or not. Please show us whatever you're doing. We're generous with our time. We love making relationships with people.
We've got a great team of analysts that'll help you guys to evaluate these things. It's got to be a new category. We're not going to be the 31st GLP-1 agonist or the 15th small nuclear reactor. We're either going to own a vertical, or we're not going to do it, right? We're not monkey see, monkey do. That's what everybody else does, right? It's going to be a platform technology. It's got to serve huge markets. Most importantly, it's got to have a clear inflection point. We just did a company that we're going to be taking public shortly called Pollux. We're doing a phase I-A or phase I/early phase II trial that could be the biggest drug ever for diabetes. It's a clear inflection point. We're not trying to get through a phase III trial.
It's either going to create multi-billion dollar value in a very predictable amount of time and capital, or we're not interested. We want clear inflection points. We don't mess around with crazy structures. We don't want to do ELOCs for our companies. We don't want to do some weird convertible preferred deal. We keep our things super clean capital structures. Companies that are not making money should not be doing things of a dilutive variable obligation, whether it's what have you. We do things. We typically do, occasionally we'll put some warrants in there, but for the most part, it's generally straight common stock. We do all these things. We do it fast. Our back office business we have in Latin America, we're now doing accounting for public companies, where actually it's really great. We work with CFOs where they can now outsource the entire full stack.
We make it easy for them to do that. Obviously, we do IP. We have relationships with law firms. I think Horatio said, "Well, it doesn't cost $2 million to go public." I think the full stack cost between the law firm, accounting, whatever else, what was it? It was $800? That's a little bit too much. We got to get that down. We really help these companies to make all that happen. We've been doing this for almost 30 years. We've never attempted an IPO we didn't complete. 18 for 18. That's with, we would typically make a pre-IPO investment, take them public. Unbelievably, again, most of these things were things that nobody would finance. About 60% of them have made it to $500 million valuations or greater.
All this track record, you can go onto our website and see every company we've ever taken public. About 30% of them have gotten to billion-dollar valuations from ideas. Horatio's got a lot of work to do. We got to get this to a billion-dollar valuation, right? We're very proud of our track record. It's our selection process. It's being stubborn. It's only just doing this the love of it, right? You guys love microcap. That's why you're here. You're looking for the next big idea. It's a wonderful thing to do. I've noticed that the guys that were the Public Venture guys that I looked up to, they all lived into their late 90s, so I'm counting on, because they're all still chasing the dream in their 90s, right? Microcap's been a horrible place to be, per se.
Not every company wins on your schedule, foundational technology rarely goes to zero. If you look at the 18 companies that we've taken public, I think only one of them has truly disappeared. It's pretty crazy when you think about none of these companies had revenue except Horatio was the first profitable company we ever took public. How did that happen? We build the foundation. That foundational technology is critical. There's a company here, Energous, that we started a number of years ago. I just ran up to the CEO. She's got the thing going. She's done a great job. What held it through was the core technology that we put in place. Shit, 12, I don't know, when did we take Energous public? It was a long time ago. Yeah, 13 years ago. Yeah. It's still here. It's still cranking away.
They're going to be actually serving the whole cold chain for people like Walmart and what have you. I'm very proud of that. We put in that core technology that was why that company's still alive. Now, if you want to buy MDB, we're actually public, and we went public at $12 a share. It's like two and change, I'm not real proud of that. I think that if you took the value of all of our assets that are on our balance sheet, and you actually thought about them as now independent, if you looked at PatentVest as independent, Public Ventures as independent, you look at once we take Pollux public, you add up all those pieces.
If any of you want to go through the math with me on it, I think you're going to recognize that this might be an opportunity to buy the stock as well. Anyways, that's it. How did I do? 16 minutes, all right. Any questions?
I'm wondering when you look at your track record in identifying new ideas, because we see a lot of big ideas that we fall in love with, but they're doing something different. Just track record as to what it is.
All right. I'm going to let Sergio, who's one of our analysts, answer that question. I don't mean to put you on the spot.
Hey, everybody. Great question. The approach we take as an analyst team is we basically boil the ocean in no matter the industry. We're industry agnostic because we're just looking for big ideas, and those innovation comes from the places you least expect them. We go over, last year, we did about 9,000 companies. Not only U.S. companies, but we're also looking Latin America, we're also looking Europe. The idea is there are amazing companies out there that have certain foundational parameters that we think are key for them to be able to not only survive in the public markets, but actually thrive once they're there, and they can sell their vision. Some of those things, our model, as you can see, we haven't made that many deals because it doesn't work for every single company out there.
You have to fit within the parameters. It is foundational technology that you own from a patent perspective. Not that you have some patents, you have a good position. You own it. If a bigger player is going to come into the industry, they either have to work with you, partner with you, license your technology, or they're going to have to buy you out. You have to have a great management. You have to have the whole patent portfolio, which we have our own patent law firm and our own patent intelligence tools that sort of run that whole process. Big markets, you have to tie the capital you're going to raise to the milestones. How can you actually create more value than the capital you're going to spend? That's the big one, because.
Sergio, talk about the training program that we built to train new analysts and how we're able to get through that many ideas because we're able to look through an idea in a couple of hours to know whether it will qualify or do that. You have to boil the ocean.
Yeah.
Right? Two, you have to have very specific criteria that will fit. That's how it is the numbers' game. Talk about how we train people to do this and what they're looking for so they can get through an idea in a couple of hours.
Right. The idea is once you actually understand the technology and its components is the first thing we do is we go to our patent base, which is our intelligence patent database that we've built for 29 years, 25 years now. 20 +. 20. The first thing is, who actually owns the technology in this space? Who are the competitors? Where are the white spaces in technology? Within a couple of hours, I can actually tell you this company has something or they just, they're dead in the water. From the patents actually.
From the patents. It's not always do they have it currently, it's can we get it? In other words, what we look for is can we be the leader, not are they the leader. That's where I think the secret sauce is that everyone. Energous was a great idea. Wireless charging was a great idea. They had a unique aspect on how to do wireless charging, and we were able to go in and help them put hundreds of patents around that concept so that they would effectively own that segment of wireless charging that we thought would be meaningful for what it's actually being used for today. That wouldn't have happened if they had not met us. In other words, it wasn't just like we put the money in. We built that foundation, which was critical. Yeah.
How would an investor look at valuing your stock? The companies that you're holding on your balance sheet.
Mm-hmm.
They're still private companies?
Mm-hmm. Right now, well, no, some are. Some are and some are not. Some are public. Some are public, yeah.
How are you rating them on your balance sheet? Are you rating them close to their latest marks, like these new rounds?
Sergio had a good idea, which we're going to implement. Now with Claude, you can put a little dashboard on there. We're going to put a dashboard where you can value each one of our assets, and you'll get what the value of MDB is. I think that we're not going to tell you what you should put in for the numbers. We may give you a little bit of guidepost, right? It might help you to come up with some numbers.
It's probably helpful to tell us where these companies, private ones, have been valued in their current rounds.
Yeah. I think the thing that, like Pollux is a great example. We're going to have data probably by mid-next year of whether the drug is safe and it works and whether it produces new beta cells, which produce insulin. It's a small molecule. We did it at a $20 million pre-money valuation, which is key to the asymmetry. We have to give the investors the upside, right? We own a big chunk of it, right? We own, I think about roughly 20% of the company. If we hit it, like if it works, I can't imagine why We couldn't sell for $5 billion, right?
If we own 20% of it, that's meaningful to the shareholders of MDB, right?
You have a built-in exit with all the companies on your balance sheet because you're going to take every single one of them public.
Yeah. If sometimes, yeah. In the case of Pollux, it may not even have the chance to get public. It may get bought, because it's not like this thing's secret. Again, we started with a group that we had a big success with, a company called Provention that we started with the same management, and we started from an idea, and it got bought by Sanofi for $2.9 billion, and they said, "Hey, we found another, we think the unbelievable diabetes drug." We did our work. Mo, who's on the team, helped license it from Mount Sinai.
We licensed the drug, and now it's going to be in humans, and it could be one of the biggest diabetes drugs of all time. Again, chance favors a prepared mind. That's what we look for. We look for this big asymmetry to upside. These things are geared big. Before we went public, we had launched the three previous public companies, all into billion-dollar valuations from ideas. Okay? These are all companies we started. Okay? We found the technology. These weren't companies. They were maybe an entrepreneur or someone that brought it to us, and then we formed a company around it. Those, we created them, right? This is the process that Sergio has described, but they're geared very big. eXoZymes.
It's struggled a little bit in the public markets, but eXoZymes is going to deliver on synthetic biology, which companies like Ginkgo that traded at a $20 billion valuation that flamed out, or others. I think eXoZymes is going to deliver on synthetic biology. It could be worth a multi-billion dollar valuation. We own 40% of the company. If that works, we only have 10 million shares outstanding, so the gearing is crazy. The asymmetry, the upside in MDB right now is pretty big. I say this is the first. I did some meetings and talked at LD Micro. This is only the second time I've been out. I generally don't like to do this. Our stock is so undervalued in my mind that I got to get out occasionally and blow the bugle.
I think the dashboard, we're going to follow through and put the dashboard on, then we can have a discussion, and you can go through and try and value those assets. I think the number is going to come to a much higher number than the stock's currently trading at. Yeah.
You know I'm a big fan of you guys at MDB. I've been around for a long time. There's such chaos right now in the small cap tier. NASDAQ is showing zero love after they reversed two or three years ago. OTC, for better or worse, is shut down. That's where I started my career in 2000. Does that chaos, the challenge to get public, all of the tightened or enhanced regulations, increased regulations, how does that affect you guys and what you see big picture going forward?
This is the last three or four years has been probably the worst three or four years of our lives when we think about it. It's just been a downhill slide for the last 25 years with microcap companies. You feel like you're a criminal if you invest in microcap. I think, listen, from a public policy perspective, I see it changing. You can see what's happening with some of the new laws that they're trying to enact, which I think Trump's done a great job in trying to bring this all back because they see the numbers, right? We are the country of dreams. Look what happened with SpaceX. That's a $2 trillion deal.
We have to launch new companies in this segment, in this microcap segment, which there used to be a vibrant market, but most of the underwriters today are just chop shops. They don't really care about these companies like we do. That's why we still do our own underwriting because we can't just go hand them off to some microcap investment bank and trust them. We have to build our own community. We have to do that because there's nobody to take these things public that I want to hang out with, right? That's the real problem, and that's why we started Public Ventures. We hope that there's some way that we can create a new platform for launching these big ideas that are good.
That is our time for today, Chris.
All right.
We appreciate your time. Thank you so much.