BenevolentAI gets cut in half
BenevolentAI, the tech company backed by Neil Woodford, is set to see its valuation halved in its latest funding round, reported the Sunday Times yesterday.
Valued at $2bn in April 2018 after it raised $115m, it is reported BenevolentAI is expecting its latest valuation to come in at just $1bn, following an investment from Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek.
The news follows an FT Alphaville investigation from June that explored the business’s escalating valuation and its close relationship with Woodford, once a highly regarded fund manager. FT Alphaville analysis suggested that just under a fifth of BenevolentAI’s shares were owned by Woodford’s Equity Income Fund and the Patient Capital Trust, as of 16 September 2018.
Investors who will be taking a bath include the two Woodford investment vehicles, Goldman Sachs, Dragons’ Den’s Richard Farleigh, and various entities linked to Minnesota’s Evenstad family, who privately own Upsher-Smith Laboratories.
However, The Patient Capital Trust might already have written down its investment. Late Thursday its board announced that it had marked down a position, in the process taking a 4 pence per share hit to its net asset value. That sent the share price down as much as 5 per cent on Friday, though it later recovered a little. Although the investment has yet to be revealed, it is likely to be BenevolentAI, which constituted 8.4 per cent of its net asset value at the end of April.
At pixel time, the Patient Capital Trust’s shares were trading up 0.11 per cent to 45.55p, a discount to NAV of 38.05 per cent.
Woodford Investment Management, the Patient Capital Trust and BenevolentAI declined to comment.