What an audited mark says a private company is worth

Where the number comes from

A business development company is a public fund that invests in private companies. Because it is public, it reports every quarter, and its notes disclose the inputs behind the value of each position it holds: the method, the range, and the multiple. Those notes are tagged, and the SEC republishes them as structured data. One of the tagged inputs is the EBITDA multiple. We loaded the notes back to December 2017 and kept every disclosure where a filer reported an EBITDA multiple on a position, dropping 2,528 values outside 1x to 40x as tagging errors. That left 9,718 readable disclosures from 183 filers, December 2017 to June 2026, and none of them names the company behind it.

This piece reads the equity stakes only

The same filers hold both loans and equity in the companies they back, and they mark both. A mark on a loan is a coverage test. A mark on an equity stake is a price. We use the equity disclosures and leave the loan book out of it entirely. That is 4,014 disclosures.

Half of the equity positions are carried between 6.5x and 15.0x EBITDA, with the middle at 9.9x. The spread is wide because the positions are, from a founder-led services firm to a sponsor-backed software company, and because each filer reports a range across a portfolio, never one company's price.

Year by year

The median has moved within about two turns of EBITDA over five years, and 2023 is the high point. The disclosure count is worth as much as the multiple: it tripled between 2022 and 2023 as more filers adopted the tag, so the earlier years are thinner ground.

Why it is a ceiling, not a peer set

The companies behind these marks are the portfolio companies of public credit funds. They skew larger and more sponsor-backed than a lower-middle-market business, so a smaller company should read 9.9x as the top of what a professional holder has been willing to carry, never as the number it will clear. Three more limits travel with the figure. These are carrying marks, not sale prices. Forward and trailing multiples are pooled, because filers tag both under the same input. And the audit covers the filer's process, not the company's worth: it means the number was arrived at honestly, not that a buyer would pay it.

What we do with this

The paid answer to this question costs about $4,000 a year and is built on surveyed deals. This one is public, audited, and refreshed monthly as the SEC republishes the notes. The Desk's Multiple read applies it to an EBITDA figure you give it and prints the implied enterprise value with every caveat above attached. What we do for founders raising sets out where that number goes next.