The honest answer is that you mostly don't value it - not in the way you value a fund holding or a listed share. You record what you paid, you carry it at the price of the last round someone else paid, and you wait. A portfolio of private early-stage companies has no ticker and no daily quote. The art is in keeping an accurate record of what you own and resisting the temptation to flatter it.
There's a reason angels who've been at it a while are relaxed about this. The number that matters is the one at exit; everything before it is bookkeeping. The job between cheque and exit is to track the position cleanly and read the few signals that genuinely tell you something.
How do you value a holding you can't sell?
The standard convention is the last priced round. When a company raises new money at an agreed valuation, that round sets a fresh price per share. You hold a known number of shares, so your holding's carrying value is simply your shares multiplied by that latest price. If you put in £25,000 at a £1 share price and the company later raises at £4 a share, your stake is carried at four times cost - on paper.
"On paper" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A priced round values the specific shares that round bought, often preference shares with rights yours may not have. It reflects what one set of investors agreed on one day, not a price you could realise. Between rounds, the number generally doesn't move at all. A company can spend two years quietly tripling revenue and still sit in your tracker at the same figure, because nobody has reset the price.
Two adjustments do move it. If a company is plainly struggling - it raises a down round at a lower price, or it's clearly running out of road - you write the holding down. And when a company fails outright, you write it to zero. Disciplined angels are quicker to mark down than up, for the same reason careful funds are: an unrealised gain is a guess, while a failure is a fact. Carrying a dead company at cost is the most common way an angel book lies to its owner.
An unrealised gain is a guess. A failure is a fact. Mark the facts first.
What should you actually track?
For each holding, a handful of fields carries the weight. You don't need anything clever to start - a spreadsheet with a row per company will outperform a vague memory every time.
- Company and date. What you backed and when the money went in. The date starts several clocks.
- Cost basis. The cash you actually invested - your cheque, before any tax relief.
- Shares and price per share. How many shares you hold and the price you paid, so you can recompute the stake after every later round.
- Current carrying value. Shares times the latest priced-round price, written down or zeroed where reality demands.
- Tax scheme. SEIS, EIS, neither - and the certificate status (more on that below).
- Events. Follow-on cheques, new rounds, dividends, partial sales, the eventual exit or write-off.
Keep dilution in view, too. Every round issues new shares, so your percentage ownership shrinks even when your share count doesn't. Tracking the price per share rather than a fixed percentage keeps you honest about that - our explainer on dilution and how it affects angel investors walks through the mechanics.
Which numbers tell you how you're doing?
No single figure captures an angel portfolio, and the ones that flatter you earliest are the least reliable. Three are worth understanding, because they answer different questions.
MOIC - the paper multiple
MOIC, the multiple on invested capital, is total value divided by total cost. A 3x book is worth three times what you put in. Simple, and easy to game without meaning to: early on, most of that "value" is paper marks from last rounds that may never be realised. A high MOIC across a young portfolio is a hypothesis, not a result.
DPI - the cash that came back
DPI, distributions to paid-in, counts only money actually returned to you - exits, secondaries, the rare dividend - against what you invested. It ignores paper entirely. DPI is the honest scoreboard, and for the first several years of any angel book it sits stubbornly near zero. That's normal. Early-stage returns arrive late and lumpy.
IRR - the timing-adjusted return
IRR, the internal rate of return, is the annualised return that accounts for when money went in and came out. A 2x over three years is a very different annual return from a 2x over ten, and IRR captures that. Its weakness mirrors MOIC's: until cash comes back, IRR leans on unrealised marks, so a young portfolio's IRR can swing wildly on a single paper revaluation. Read it alongside DPI, never instead of it.
Behind all three sits the shape of early-stage returns: a small number of holdings carry the whole book while most return little or nothing. If that pattern is new to you, it's the single most important thing to internalise - we cover it in how angel returns actually work: the power law. It's why obsessing over the carrying value of any one position is usually wasted energy.
How do SEIS and EIS change the tracking?
The reliefs don't touch a holding's valuation - your stake is still your shares at the last price, full stop. What they change is your true cost and the paperwork you have to keep on top of.
Under SEIS, the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme, you can claim 50% income tax relief on up to £200,000 invested per tax year, so a £20,000 cheque costs you £10,000 net before any other relief. EIS, the Enterprise Investment Scheme, gives 30% relief on up to £1,000,000 a year (or up to £2,000,000 where at least £1,000,000 goes into knowledge-intensive companies). Both carry a minimum holding period of three years; both can be carried back to the previous tax year; both offer loss relief if the company fails, and a capital gains exemption on the shares if you've held for three years or more and received income tax relief. Those are the investor figures that matter for tracking - the full, current detail lives in HMRC's guidance for investors, and the company-side eligibility ceilings (some of which moved in April 2026) in the EIS scheme guidance.
For the tracker, that translates into three columns you can't skip:
- Which scheme each holding sits under, since the cost-after-relief is very different.
- The clock. The date the holding period started, so you know when the three-year window closes. Sell or lose qualifying status too early and the income tax relief can be clawed back.
- The certificate. Whether you've received the company's SEIS3 or EIS3 certificate and claimed the relief. No certificate, no claim - and they need advance assurance from HMRC before the investment for the scheme to apply at all.
Multiply that across a couple of dozen holdings and the annual scramble to match certificates to a self-assessment return becomes the real administrative load of angel investing - the unglamorous half where a tidy record pays for itself. For the mechanics, see how to claim SEIS and EIS tax relief: the SEIS3 and EIS3 process.
Spreadsheet or software?
Start with a spreadsheet. For a book of five or fifteen holdings, a well-kept sheet beats any tool, because the value is in the discipline of recording each event, not the software. Add a column for notes - why you marked something down, what a founder said on a call - and your future self will thank you when memory blurs.
Once you're past twenty or thirty positions, or investing through several syndicates and SPVs, dedicated portfolio tools and platform dashboards earn their place. They'll pull share counts, flag holding-period dates, and aggregate across vehicles. None of them removes the need to understand the underlying numbers - they just stop you transcribing them by hand. The cap table each company sends remains your source of truth for what you actually own.
How often should you revalue?
There's no obligation on an individual angel to mark a portfolio on any schedule. A sensible rhythm: update a holding's value only when something real happens to it - a new priced round, an obvious write-down, a distribution - and run a full review once a year. The annual pass conveniently lines up with self-assessment season and the SEIS3/EIS3 paperwork, so you do the housekeeping once. Resist revaluing on vibes between those points. A founder's confident update is not a priced round.
FAQ
How do angels value a startup they hold before it is sold?
Most angels carry a holding at its last priced round - the price per share from the most recent funding round, applied to the shares they own. Between rounds the figure usually doesn't move. If a company is clearly in trouble it may be written down; if it has obviously failed it's written to zero. This is a convention for record-keeping, not a price anyone can sell at.
What is the difference between IRR, MOIC and DPI?
MOIC (multiple on invested capital) is total value divided by what you put in - a 3x means the portfolio is worth three times its cost. DPI (distributions to paid-in) counts only cash actually returned, so it strips out paper marks. IRR (internal rate of return) is the annualised return that accounts for timing. Early on, IRR and MOIC lean heavily on paper valuations; DPI is the one that reflects real money back.
Do I need software to track an angel portfolio?
No. A disciplined spreadsheet handles most angel books: one row per holding with the date, cheque, shares, price per share, scheme and certificate status. Dedicated portfolio tools and the dashboards on syndicate platforms help once you hold many positions, but the discipline of recording each event matters more than the tool.
How does SEIS or EIS affect how I track a holding?
The reliefs don't change a holding's valuation, but they change your true cost and create paperwork you must track. Record which scheme applies, the date the three-year holding clock started, and whether you've received the SEIS3 or EIS3 certificate and claimed the relief. Selling too early or losing the certificate can cost the relief, so the dates and documents belong in your tracker.
How often should an angel revalue a portfolio?
There's no rule for individuals. A practical rhythm is to update valuations when something real happens - a new round, a clear write-down, a distribution - and to do a full review once a year, which also lines up with self-assessment and SEIS3/EIS3 paperwork.
One note, and an important one. Everything here is general information about how angels value and track holdings - it is not investment, tax or financial advice, and nothing in it tells you what to buy, hold or sell. Angel investing is high risk and your capital is at stake. The right approach for your circumstances is a question for an FCA-regulated adviser, and tax treatment depends on your own situation and can change.