Six Iranian Venture Exits, Priced

On 20 August we published a census of every change of ownership in the Tehran Index registry and reported that written deal terms existed for none of the six completed transfers. The only price anywhere in that set had been spoken in a video interview. That was true of the record as it stood. It is no longer true of the record, because there is a place where Iranian venture exits are written down with a price, a date and a buyer, and it had not been read.

Iranian venture funds are listed instruments. Twenty of them are registered issuers on Codal, the exchange disclosure system, and each files audited financial statements whose notes must show every position at cost, every sale with its proceeds, and, for positions still held, a summary of the investee’s own accounts. The statements are scanned Farsi PDFs with no text layer. We indexed all 28 audited letters across the 20 funds and have so far read 17 of them page by page. Six completed exits with a printed price came out. This note is those six.

The six, and what they sold for

Five of the six come from one filing. The University of Tehran’s first venture fund sold every position it held during the year to 20 March 2025 and its auditor printed the movement: 109,195 million rial of cost went out, 193,999 million rial of proceeds came in, a gain of 84,805 million rial, about 8.5 billion toman. Two positions made the money, the seed company at 2.9 times and the heavy-freight marketplace at 3.1 times. The other three came back at cost or a little above it, including Netbar, a goods-transport platform returned at exactly what the fund paid, 25,000 million rial for 20 percent, after under three years.

The sixth is the one worth a reader’s time. Pezeshk Khoob, a consumer health platform, was bought back from the Arman Ati venture fund by its founder and other shareholders on 13 September 2025 for 27,250 million rial, 2.725 billion toman, against a cost the fund’s prior-year note puts at 3,000 million rial. A cash multiple of 9.1. The same filing gives the company’s own figures for the year to March 2025: revenue of 201,884 million rial, about 20.2 billion toman, up 136 percent on the year before, and a net profit of 18,150 million rial, with the caveat, printed by the fund, that those figures were taken from the company’s tax return rather than audited accounts.

What the prices say

Three things, and none of them is what the standing line about Iranian venture capital says.

First, the exits are small. In dollars at the desk’s period rates, about 80,000 toman to the dollar in January 2025 and about 60,000 in July and August 2024, the five University of Tehran sales together returned roughly a quarter of a million dollars: 14.4 billion toman at the January rate and 5.0 billion at the summer rate. The Pezeshk Khoob sale is left in toman because the desk holds no canonical rate for September 2025 and will not pick one for the occasion. These are the prices at which a university-backed fund liquidated a portfolio and at which a listed fund was bought out of a growing, profitable company. They are the market.

Second, the distribution is the venture distribution, compressed. One deal at 9.1 times, two near 3 times, three at 1.0 to 1.1 times: a median of 2.0 and an aggregate of 1.97 on the six. Nothing was written off in this set, which is a selection effect, since the same filings record write-offs on positions that were not sold: Arman Ati carries one holding at nil and says in plain language that another, Azmayesh Online, has ceased activity. The exits are the survivors.

Third, the buyer is the founder. Five of the six positions went to private individuals, in one case explicitly the founder and other shareholders, and the sixth to a private company. No corporate acquirer, no other fund, no listing. That is the founder buy-back mechanism, which our 18 August note described from one on-record case and which these filings show as the default: a venture fund in Iran is repaid, when it is repaid, by the people it backed.

The other side of the same filings

The exit table is the half of the record that closes. The same notes show entries, at prices, in the same year. Ofogh Negar paid 910 billion rial, 91 billion toman, towards what its own note says will be 70.25 percent of Jooya Behnood, a laboratory-services company with 1,709,742 million rial of revenue, about 171 billion toman, and 188,219 million rial of net profit in the year to 20 March 2026. That is a control purchase of a profitable services business by a vehicle registered as a venture fund, and the fund’s prospectus language, an exit in three to five years, reads as private equity rather than venture. A second entry sits beside it: Arman Ati reports that the founders of one of its holdings, a subscription-goods company it owns 53.78 percent of, have begun buying the fund out, with 2 billion rial returned and the balance expected by March 2027.

Both transactions carry a stated price, which is the point. The record we published on 20 August held six ownership transfers and zero written terms because it was built from company statements, press and one foreign shareholder’s annual report. The seller’s audited note is a different kind of document. It has to reconcile.

How a private company’s accounts become public

Iranian private companies do not publish accounts, and the ones in this note do not. Their numbers are here because a shareholder bound by an audit regime must disclose them. A venture fund’s annual statement carries a note headed summary financial information of venture investments, one row per investee: total assets, total liabilities, equity, revenue and net result, for the investee’s own latest year. Read across 17 filings, that note gave us about 45 investee balance sheets and income statements, 38 of which foot to the rial or to rounding. The seven that do not are withheld, one because the auditor printed a spare zero, one because three lines of a balance sheet cannot all be right at once, and one because two funds that hold the same company report figures that do not join. We loaded nothing that does not reconcile, and we state that on each fact.

The method has a lag built in. A fund’s year to March 2026 most often carries investee accounts to March 2025, sometimes March 2024, and one fund left the current year blank because its investees had not supplied it. Where a fund says a row came from a tax return rather than an audit, that is printed on the fact. The period on every figure is the investee’s, never the fund’s.

What we do not know

We do not know what Pezeshk Khoob is worth, and we do not publish a number. A 10.87 percent stake sold for 27,250 million rial implies a figure for the whole company that any reader can compute, and that figure is a founder’s buy-back price for a minority, not a market. We do not know the entry date of that position, only that the fund’s prior-year note carries it at 3,000 million rial. We do not know the identities of the individual buyers beyond what the filings print, and we do not reproduce names of private persons. We do not know whether the 11 letters still unread carry further exits; they are mostly interim statements, which usually carry the holdings table without the sales movement, so the count of six may be close to complete for the twenty funds, or not. We will know when they are read. And we do not know why one auditor allowed a balance sheet whose liabilities and equity exceed its assets by a factor of two to be printed in a note; that row is held, and the fund’s next filing will settle it.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Six Iranian Venture Exits, Priced”, 3 September 2026. Exit prices, costs, dates and buyer types from audited financial statements filed on Codal by the University of Tehran first venture fund (year to 20 March 2025, tracing 1332860), the Arman Ati venture fund (year to 20 March 2026, tracing 1557615) and the Ofogh Negar venture fund (year to 20 March 2026, tracing 1532917), read from the scanned attachments on 2 September 2026. Fund census and reading count from the Tehran Index Codal venture-fund index, 20 funds, 28 audited letters, 17 read at publication. Registry n=402 records, 377 public, 304 companies, 3 September 2026. Dollar equivalents at the desk’s stated period rates and marked as such.