Best Business Valuation Software for Startups

Equidam covers pre-revenue and early-stage startups well — but stops at Series A. Kroll does 409A engagements for later-stage companies but requires a managed services contract. PitchBook and CapIQ give you market intelligence but don't run valuations. Every other platform on the market covers one or two stages of the startup lifecycle.

Equitest covers them all: Berkus and Scorecard for pre-revenue seed, First Chicago and VC Method for Series A, DCF with high-growth assumptions and Monte Carlo for growth stage, OPM for complex cap structures, DLOM for illiquid minority positions, a native 409A module for every option grant, and the full M&A suite for exit. One platform. Every stage.

IRC §409A requires a qualified independent appraisal before every significant option grant. Most startups either pay a specialist firm (Carta, Kroll, Big 4) for a managed 409A engagement — expensive and slow — or rely on a platform-generated report that may not meet IRS defensibility standards.

Equitest's native 409A module produces a standalone IRS-compliant equity compensation valuation report, self-serve, incorporating the required methodologies (backsolve, OPM, PWERM where applicable) and the documentation an IRS auditor expects to see. For a startup issuing options quarterly, this is a high-value capability that eliminates a recurring advisory expense.

A startup's value is inherently uncertain. The standard approach — build a DCF with a single set of growth assumptions and report a point estimate — understates that uncertainty and makes the valuation easy to attack. Monte Carlo simulation runs 10,000+ scenarios across the distribution of your key assumptions (growth rate, margin, discount rate) and reports a probability-weighted range with confidence intervals.

For a Series B company preparing for investor due diligence, or a growth-stage company preparing a secondary transaction, the Monte Carlo range is a more honest and more defensible representation of value than any single DCF output.

Equitest's 40-chapter institutional report includes an executive summary appropriate for an investor presentation, full methodology disclosure suitable for due diligence, market comparables for benchmarking, and a Football Field Chart showing value range across all methods. At seed stage, you can use the executive summary. At Series B, you deliver the complete 40-chapter report. At exit, you submit it as part of the M&A data room.

The same platform, the same report architecture, calibrated to the depth the moment requires.

Private startup equity is illiquid. When a startup needs to value a minority position for a secondary transaction, an employee exercise, or a financial reporting requirement (ASC 820), the Discount for Lack of Marketability is a required and heavily scrutinised input.

Equitest applies DLOM using four independent quantitative models — Chaffe, Longstaff, Finnerty, and Ghaidarov — each producing a defensible, reproducible result from your specific inputs. Not a single assumed discount percentage, but a methodology-backed conclusion across four models.