IP Group (IPG) is a venture investor, holding c. £0.9bn of investments on-balance-sheet, with c. £0.5bn of fee-earning 3rd-party AUM. Shareholders and fund investors own indirect stakes in some of the UK’s most innovative companies, often built on scientific breakthroughs at top universities, where IPG has many, longstanding, hard-to-replicate partnerships.
There are limited options for private or smaller investors to invest in these companies. IPG solves that problem. Also, evaluating and tracking these investments needs deep specialist knowledge in many complex scientific and commercial fields. IPG solves that problem too.
Its specialist fields are HealthTech, DeepTech, and CleanTech. The portfolio is of sufficient scale to regularly produce high returning ‘winners’, it is mature enough to regularly generate far more cash than it deploys and return money to shareholders, and the portfolio looks conservatively valued.
Group NAV on 31 Dec 25 was £975m or 110p per share, including net cash of 8.5p. So IPG shares trade at a 43% discount to NAV, which looks excessive given most exits have been at a premium to NAV.
Our own calculation gives a fundamental value of 106p per share - a series of exits at or above NAV could rapidly close this valuation gap.
