Aberlyn Capital
Executive Summary
The venture leasing deal that Aberlyn proposed to RhoMed is an innovative way for RhoMed, a start-up firm, to acquire financing without diluting its equity value and raising debt in the market. Management believes that the firm is more valuable than venture capital firms would believe, and debt financing would be extremely costly since RhoMed doesn’t currently have positive cash flow. For Aberlyn, the main benefits of the transaction are the interest payments paid on the lease and potential to sell the patent for a much higher value than the original $1 Million valuation by RhoMed. However, this is a rather risky investment for Aberlyn. If RhoMed defaults on its payments, Aberlyn uses the patent as collateral and must sell it in the market. Since the patent is highly individualized and therefore may not be commercially feasible, the patent is probably worth less than what Lulu’s valuation suggests.
RhoMed has limited options in terms of financing as the cost of debt and equity are both very expensive for start-up firms without positive cash flow. However, by going this route, they are risking losing the main driver of their business - their patent. In order to value RhoMed as a whole we needed to make numerous assumptions, particularly on their future revenue streams, a huge driver for the valuation and share value, as our sensitivity analysis suggests. We believe that the revenue projections given in the case are far too optimistic. We projected our own descending annual growth rates for revenue and assumed that the firm reaches stability in 2004 and grows at the inflation rate of 3%. We estimated capex by using a constant percentage of revenue of 21% and we used our estimated capex to estimate depreciation. Based on these assumptions, the NPV for the value of the firm is about $19.5 M and with a share value of $3.45. To value the warrants we used the black-Scholes model and reached a call price of $180,915 in total or $2.63 per warrant.
The venture leasing deal that Aberlyn proposed to RhoMed is an innovative way for RhoMed, a start-up firm, to acquire financing without diluting its equity value and raising debt in the market. Management believes that the firm is more valuable than venture capital firms would believe, and debt financing would be extremely costly since RhoMed doesn’t currently have positive cash flow. For Aberlyn, the main benefits of the transaction are the interest payments paid on the lease and potential to sell the patent for a much higher value than the original $1 Million valuation by RhoMed. However, this is a rather risky investment for Aberlyn. If RhoMed defaults on its payments, Aberlyn uses the patent as collateral and must sell it in the market. Since the patent is highly individualized and therefore may not be commercially feasible, the patent is probably worth less than what Lulu’s valuation suggests.
RhoMed has limited options in terms of financing as the cost of debt and equity are both very expensive for start-up firms without positive cash flow. However, by going this route, they are risking losing the main driver of their business - their patent. In order to value RhoMed as a whole we needed to make numerous assumptions, particularly on their future revenue streams, a huge driver for the valuation and share value, as our sensitivity analysis suggests. We believe that the revenue projections given in the case are far too optimistic. We projected our own descending annual growth rates for revenue and assumed that the firm reaches stability in 2004 and grows at the inflation rate of 3%. We estimated capex by using a constant percentage of revenue of 21% and we used our estimated capex to estimate depreciation. Based on these assumptions, the NPV for the value of the firm is about $19.5 M and with a share value of $3.45. To value the warrants we used the black-Scholes model and reached a call price of $180,915 in total or $2.63 per warrant.