Most of Iran’s Venture-Backed Companies Make a Profit

Iranian venture funds are listed instruments. Twenty of them are registered issuers on Codal, the exchange disclosure system, and the audited statements they file carry a note headed summary financial information of venture investments. That note prints one row for each portfolio company: total assets, total liabilities, equity, revenue and net result, for the company’s own latest period. For a private Iranian technology company, it is the likeliest place an audited income statement will ever appear.

On 3 September we published the exit prices out of those filings, and said at the end of that piece that the same reading had produced about 45 investee balance sheets and income statements. We had not read what they said. This is that. It is a different question with a different answer: not what these companies sold for, but whether they make money.

Across 25 audited letters from 17 funds, 28 companies carry a dated income statement. Eighteen of the 28 posted a net profit in their latest reported period. That is the opposite of the profile the venture model is built to produce.

First the perimeter, because it moves the number

A fund with the Farsi word for venture in its registered name is not necessarily a venture fund. Seven of the 28 companies are not technology businesses at all: four pharmaceutical and health producers, a laboratory-services chain, a human-capital business and a capital-management group. Six of those seven are profitable, which is what established manufacturing and services businesses usually are, and counting them flatters the headline. Rooyesh Lotus, the most active filer of the twenty, holds 43.4 of its 57.0 billion toman of venture book in three cell-therapy companies with no revenue at all. Tosee Fanavari Armani has about 45 percent of its book in a pharmaceutical manufacturer that earned 98.2 billion toman of net profit on 370.0 billion toman of revenue in the year to 20 March 2025.

The rule we applied: a company counts as technology when its own fund describes its project as a software, platform, internet, data or games business. That leaves 21, of which 12 made a net profit. Two of the seven excluded, Mehrnam and Behrad Rooyesh Rooyan, are called health-technology businesses by their fund even though their stated projects are services and medical production, and both are profitable; count them in and it is 14 of 23. Either way the majority is real, and either way it runs against the model, which is built to hold a book of loss-makers on purpose because the capital exists to buy growth ahead of earnings.

The twenty one

The loss-making nine show a pattern the profit count hides. Two of them are unwinding rather than investing, and their own funds say so. Azmayesh Online had ceased activity by the time its fund filed, and the fund is pursuing a decision on liquidation. On Nobar the same fund reports the dissolution of parts of the company and the transfer of assets, alongside exit negotiations. Two more are deteriorating on the figures rather than on any statement: Bimeh Bazar lost 2.7 billion toman on 1.0 billion toman of revenue, and Takhfifan grew revenue 3 percent while its loss widened by about two thirds and its liabilities more than doubled. Only IranTalent reads like a company deliberately buying growth: revenue roughly tripled in the period to 20 December 2024 while the loss grew about sevenfold.

The reading that fits is structural, not cultural. An Iranian fund cannot underwrite losses for long, because there is no deep follow-on round to hand a burning company to and, as the currency evidence shows, no exit market that converts. What survives long enough to appear in an audited note is therefore weighted towards companies that reached profitability early, and the 2 clearest wind-downs in this set are both on the loss-making side of it. That is a reading of the pattern. The finding is the count.

Then the scale, which is the whole catch

The largest technology company in this set by revenue is Khanoumi, an online beauty and personal-care retailer, at 1,149.7 billion toman in the year to 20 March 2025 with a net profit of 65.4 billion. At the audited 2024-25 average of about 70,000 toman to the dollar that is about $16.4 million of revenue and about $0.93 million of profit. The second is Wallex, a crypto exchange, which turned over 327.1 billion toman in the same year and made 25.4 billion, about $4.7 million and about $360,000. After those two the drop is steep: the next four technology companies reporting that year run from about $1.1 million of revenue down to about $0.8 million.

We give no dollar figure for the rows ending 20 March 2026, including Wallex’s 484.2 billion toman of revenue in that year, because the desk holds no audited average rate for it and will not pick one for the occasion. The direction is safe to state without one. The rial fell hard across that year, so a dollar reading of Wallex’s 48 percent toman increase in revenue would be a great deal smaller, and on the rates the desk does hold for the periods either side of it, it would not be an increase at all. It is the same arithmetic that made Tehran’s 23 percent equity rally worth nothing in dollars.

Both things are true at once. Most of the companies Iranian venture funds hold turn a profit, and the largest technology name among them turns over about $16.4 million a year while sixteen of the twenty one turn over less than 100 billion toman. Profitability here is not a signal of maturity. It is what a company looks like when nobody will fund it to be anything else.

A 650 billion toman gap on the same company, in the same year

Khanoumi is also the best argument in this piece for why the fund note matters, because we hold two figures for it and they do not agree. Khanoumi’s own annual report puts sales at 1,800 billion toman for the year to 20 March 2025, and Tehran Index has carried that figure, attributed to the company, since 20 August. The audited accounts of the same legal entity for the same year, printed by the Sarv fund in note 10-2 of its annual and again in note 10-3 of its interim, give revenue of 1,149.7 billion toman. The gap is about 650 billion toman, roughly $9 million at the same audited average.

Neither document explains the difference and we are not going to invent an explanation. Sales and audited revenue are different measures and can legitimately differ: gross merchandise value on a marketplace is not the operating revenue of the entity that runs it. What matters for a reader is that only one of the two numbers has an auditor behind it, and it is the smaller one, and it is the one that was not published by the company. That is the whole case for reading the shareholder rather than the company, and it applies to every company-stated figure on this site, including ours.

Eight of the eleven

The Tehran Index registry holds 402 records, 375 of them public. Eleven of those public records carry both a revenue figure and a net result: Basalam, Digikala, Dr. Saina, IranTalent, Irancell, Miare, Nobar, Pezeshk Khoob, Takhfifan, Tapsi and Wallex. Eight of the eleven publish nothing themselves and are on the record only because a venture fund had to file.

The three that are not show how narrow the alternatives are. Tapsi files its own accounts because it is a listed issuer. Irancell’s numbers exist because a shareholder files them in Johannesburg. Digikala’s reached the public through domestic press reporting of its audited group statements. We have found no fourth route. A private Iranian technology company’s income statement becomes public when somebody else is obliged to publish it, and in eight cases out of eleven that somebody is a venture fund.

Eleven of the 21 technology companies in this set have no record in the registry yet: Arya Toosan, Goldis, Vanda Raymand Sharif, Rayan, Rahbord Ide Al Amin, Faradid Ertebat Fava, Shahriaran Tejarat Elektronik, Nano Watch, Azmayesh Online, Paya Danesh Arya and Pardazeshgaran Zaban Vira. Each has a filed income statement and no company record here. They are the coverage queue.

What we do not know

We do not know what share of Iran’s venture-backed companies these 28 represent, because no Iranian source publishes the population. Twenty eight is what 25 filings contain, not a sample drawn from a known universe, and it must not be treated as one. The periods do not line up either: the rows run from the year ended 19 March 2024 to the year ended 20 March 2026, so no year-on-year market figure is computed here and none should be computed from the table.

Two exclusions are worth stating because both cut against the headline. The Sepehr fund prints three complete income statements, all three profitable, and prints no period on any of them; a result with no period is not a result in a latest-period count, so they are out, and the published number is lower for it. Pishgam Roshd Yekom, which holds the largest portfolio in the sweep at eighteen positions, prints balance sheets only, including for Basalam and Medrick, so neither company’s current revenue or result is in this set at all. What the note contains is at the filer’s discretion, and the filers do not agree.

We publish nothing from six rows that failed the footing test, where assets do not equal liabilities plus equity as printed. Where only the balance sheet failed and the revenue and result did not depend on it, the revenue and result are used and the balance sheet is held, which is the case for Dr. Saina and IranTalent.

We do not know which company the Partian fund’s smallest technology position actually is. The filing gives the legal name Pardazeshgaran Zaban Vira and describes it as intelligent text processing, and a plausible-looking registry match was tested and rejected on 7 September as a different company in a different city. The accounts are printed here under the legal name and attached to no brand, which is where they stay until a registry record settles it.

We did not know, until this morning, that the largest company in this set was one we already cover. The Sarv fund prints its biggest investee only as Tejarat Khallagh Hadaf and never states its business, and for a week it sat on our own list of companies found in the sweep and not in the registry. It is Khanoumi, and our record has carried the matching national identifier since July with the Farsi legal name left empty, so a match run on legal name alone could never find it. The fix is a method note rather than a correction: match an investee on its national identifier as well as its name. We are publishing the mistake because a reader who cannot see our misses cannot calibrate our hits.

Two near-misses on the registry side are worth naming so nobody reproduces them from a loose query. System Group carries a net profit with no revenue figure. Khanoumi carries a company-stated sales figure with no result, which is why it is not one of the eleven records above even though it is the largest company in this piece. Three further records carry a row reading not disclosed that a naive search for revenue will match. The eleven named above are the records that carry both, as figures.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Most of Iran’s Venture-Backed Companies Make a Profit”, 9 September 2026. Investee revenue and net-result figures from audited financial statements filed on Codal by the Sarv Roshd Paydar Yekom (tracing 1589852 and 1483028), Rooyesh Lotus (1535324), Arman Ati (1557615), Tosee Fanavari Armani (1544915), Partian, Arghavan, Pishraft, Ofogh Negar, Tehran 2 and Pension Technology venture funds, read from the scanned attachments on 2 and 3 September 2026; 25 of the 27 audited letters indexed across the 17 funds that have one. Registry n=402 records, 375 public, 851 public facts, re-queried 9 September 2026. Khanoumi identified as the filings’ Tejarat Khallagh Hadaf by national identifier on 9 September 2026; its company-stated sales figure is from its own annual report and is labelled as such wherever it appears. Dollar equivalents at the audited 2024-25 average of about 70,000 toman to the dollar, applied only to periods ending 20 March 2025 and labelled at every use.