Pre-money valuation plus the amount of new money being raised equals post-money valuation — it’s the starting point of the math that determines how much equity new investors get for their check and how much existing shareholders get diluted. Because it directly sets the price per share, pre-money valuation is one of the most heavily negotiated numbers in any term sheet.

A nuance that trips up beginners reading startup news: the valuation figure quoted in a press release or headline is almost always the post-money figure, not pre-money, since post-money is the more impressive, larger-sounding number for a press release. To find the implied pre-money valuation from a headline, you generally need to subtract the round size from the reported valuation yourself — the two numbers are easy to mix up if you don’t know which convention is being used.

🇵🇭 Philippine Example

Voyager Innovations (Maya) was reported to reach a valuation of US$1.4 billion after its US$210 million raise in April 2022. Press coverage of that figure follows the standard convention of reporting the post-money valuation, so the implied pre-money valuation would be roughly US$1.19 billion (US$1.4 billion minus the US$210 million raised) — this is our own calculation from the two publicly reported figures, not an officially disclosed pre-money number.

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