Tomasz Felpel prices private companies for a living. He is the founder and CEO of Value Alpha, an AI-native valuation platform for private markets, and co-founder of Sonnerie VC, an early-stage healthcare fund. He has priced more than 1,000 private companies. Before founding Value Alpha he worked buy-side corporate development and M&A at Fortune 500 scale, including work on the revenue-synergy committee for the $26.2 billion DuPont Nutrition and Biosciences merger with IFF. He maintains the Private Company Valuation Index, an analysis of 7,601 private-company transactions tracking what small and asset-light businesses actually sell for, and how far that sits below what sellers ask. He can comment on: what a private business is really worth and why owners are usually surprised at ...