Schwarz Gruppe, the European retail group, appears near the top of one private-company ranking with a last valuation of $200.4 billion. The date column next to it is blank and the rounds column reads zero. That single row captures the central issue with directories of this kind: they can tell you a great deal about a company, but each number needs checking for where it came from and how old it is.
Private-company directories are popular because so much of the value in technology now sits outside public markets. Here is how to read one, and what a listing does and does not mean.
What the directory is
The Canborsa pre-IPO company directory is a set of company records. It counts 950 companies, with 924 placed in sectors and 26 unassigned, across 28 sector groups. The largest are healthcare and life sciences (87), artificial intelligence (84), fintech and payments (76), e-commerce and marketplaces (56) and enterprise software (55). The table ranks companies by the last valuation they were priced at.
Each row has seven columns: rank, company, sector, last valuation, date, number of rounds, and status or price. Company records then link to further pages:
- A company profile
- Valuation history
- Funding rounds
- How to invest
- Stock and IPO status
- Competitors
It is a reference tool. A company’s presence in it tells you that data has been compiled on that company. It doesn’t tell you that the shares are for sale.
A listing is not a market
The status column is the first thing to read. Among the top 100 rows, 85 are marked Private, 6 Filed, 3 Public and 3 Acquired, while 3 link to a ticker: SpaceX (SPCX), ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Cerebras Systems (CBRS). So despite the heading, not every record is still a private company. xAI, for example, shows as Acquired.
Among those rows, only the ticker links point to Canborsa markets, and those markets are derivatives. The SpaceX investing page says plainly that the SPCX perpetual “is a derivative and does not convey SpaceX shares”. For a private company without a ticker, there is nothing to trade on the site. OpenAI’s valuation page states that the company has no listed share price, and it shows no OpenAI market. It points to NVDA-PERP as the closest market on the exchange, but a chipmaker’s perpetual is at best a loose proxy, since NVIDIA’s price will also react to many things that have nothing to do with OpenAI.
Nothing in the pages reviewed offers a way to buy private shares through the site. The how-to-invest page for SpaceX describes routes that mostly sit elsewhere: listed funds that may hold the stock, which you should confirm in the latest schedule of investments; secondary marketplaces, which require accredited-investor status and company transfer approval; and invitation-only employee-share vehicles. Those conditions exclude many ordinary investors.
Why the numbers are hard to verify
Public companies publish audited accounts and trade at visible prices. Private companies generally do neither, so anyone compiling this data is working from partial evidence:
- Sources are uneven. Figures tend to come from press reports, company announcements, investor statements and regulatory filings.
- Attribution may be missing. The pages reviewed for this article do not name external sources for their figures, so you can’t trace a number from the page alone.
- Records go stale. A last valuation can be months or years old, and the date column matters as much as the amount.
- Coverage is patchy. Rounds may be missing, particularly for older or non-US companies, and a zero in the rounds column may reflect limited data.
How to read a valuation
The directory’s OpenAI page offers a good definition: “A private valuation is the price agreed in one transaction.” It adds that the figure holds until the next priced round or secondary sale, with no daily price and no order book in between. It lists a last valuation of $852 billion post-money from a $122 billion round in March 2026, which implies $730 billion pre-money.
A few points apply to any such figure:
- It extrapolates from a small slice. Here is an illustrative example. A company with 10 million fully diluted shares sells 500,000 new shares at $50 each, raising $25 million. The headline valuation is $500 million, even though only 5% of the company changed hands at that price.
- Share classes differ. New investors usually buy preferred stock, which can carry protections such as liquidation preferences. Applying that price to common shares can overstate what those are worth.
- Round and secondary prices are different things. OpenAI’s history mixes both. A secondary sale may involve a discount, restrictions or a small group of sellers, and a mix of the two types isn’t one clean price series.
- A valuation doesn’t go down by itself. With no continuous market, a company whose prospects have worsened can keep an old headline figure until a new transaction happens.
Treat a directory valuation as a dated data point, and go back to the original announcement or filing if the number matters to you.
If a ticker does appear
Where a company links to a perpetual, a separate set of risks applies. Check these first:
- Liquidation. SPCX is offered with up to 20x leverage, so a modest move can erase the margin.
- Funding. Holding costs are charged on notional value and can move against you.
- Thin hours. Smaller markets can see wide spreads and sudden jumps.
- Price source. The SpaceX page says its perp tracks secondary-market pricing. That makes the reference and the oracle worth examining, along with the usual smart contract and stablecoin risks.
- Legal availability. Access varies by country, and share-linked derivatives may face tighter rules.
Using it well
A directory like this works best for orientation: seeing who raised money, how recently, and who the competitors are. It can start your research, but it shouldn’t finish it, and a high ranking is a statement about the last price paid, not about quality.
This article is for educational purposes only and is not financial advice. Leveraged derivatives carry a high risk of loss.
