South African fintech startup EquityMaven has rolled out a service offering highly-detailed, investment banking-style business valuations online.
Launched this month by investment banker Sean Rule, with Craig Stone and Gareth Mountain as strategic investors and Rob LeBlanc as managing partner, EquityMaven plans to disrupt the traditional valuations space.
The startup was launched by Rule after he decided there was an urgent need for more affordable and rapid valuations, whether a user is selling or buying a business, raising capital, or planning an inheritance.
Using insights developed from his 20 years of industry experience, EquityMaven’s valuations give clients the ability to value companies in all stages of their lifecycle, from post-revenue startups to mature corporations.
Traditional company valuations can be prohibitively expensive and slow, costing up to US$10,000 per valuation, and taking weeks if not months to complete. EquityMaven is charging less than US$99 per month, and once data inputs are entered by the user reports are available for download immediately. Valuations are undertaken using automation and proprietary valuation algorithms.
“Reports can be revised as many times as the client needs to, and they’ll immediately be able to see the effect on the valuation if inputs change,” said Rule.
The EquityMaven tool benchmarks key performance indicators (KPIs) of a business against global industry averages, leveraging data across more than 400 industries in over 120 countries and more than 50 currencies, allowing users to evaluate where they are over- or under-performing relative to their peers.
Beyond catering to business owners, EquityMaven is also developing an enterprise offering for launch later this year to enable investors, financial advisors, bankers and insurers to assess the performance of individual private companies and make more informed decisions for their clients.
