TL;DR. The known-and-knowable evidence standard is the rule that decides which facts can influence a Fair Value mark and which can't. The 2025 IPEV update made it explicit in Section 2.5. Founders who build a contemporaneous, timestamped evidence trail at round close get every honest fact counted; founders who don't, watch the Fund refuse to count their best evidence when the macro turns.
There are two kinds of evidence a Fair Value committee considers. One counts. The other doesn't. The 2025 IPEV update codified the rule that distinguishes them, and the rule is stricter than founders typically realise.
This is the fourth piece in the IPEV Founder Series. The first three covered the frame (Why your Series A pitch is really a Fair Value defence in disguise), the calibration discipline (Calibration: the discipline that turns a number into a defensible number), and the maintainable earnings reconciliation (Maintainable earnings: closing the gap between your accounts and the Fund's number). This piece deals with the evidentiary plumbing under all three.
The rule is this: at any Fair Value measurement date, the only evidence that can influence the mark is evidence that was known, or knowable, at that date. Specifically:
Known evidence. Facts that were demonstrably in the possession of market participants at the measurement date. The strongest form: dated, timestamped, in the round-close data room or in a regulatory filing.
Knowable evidence. Facts that a hypothetical market participant could have discovered through reasonable diligence at the measurement date. The bar is lower than known, but the participant still needs to be able to demonstrate that the fact was accessible.
Hindsight evidence. Facts that became known after the measurement date. These are explicitly excluded. A customer that signed in Q3 cannot be used to support a Q2 Fair Value mark, even if the customer was clearly going to sign. The IPEV standard treats this as a bright line.
The discipline matters because a Fair Value committee has to defend its mark against an auditor who runs the same test. Evidence that fails the known-and-knowable test is excluded — even when everyone in the room knows the evidence is real and would have been counted under a more permissive standard.
A fact that wasn't in your data room at the relevant date cannot rescue your valuation at the next quarterly mark — even if it is true, material, and would have been provable with a phone call. The discipline is to contemporaneously record everything that might matter, dated, before you need it.
The 2025 IPEV update made three operational changes to evidence practice.
Documentation requirement. Where pre-2025 the known-and-knowable principle was implicit, Section 2.5 now requires the valuer to document the evidence base at each measurement date, including what was excluded and why. The documentation is itself the audit trail.
Contemporaneity standard. The 2025 update explicitly requires evidence to be contemporaneous. A retrospective customer list compiled six months after the date does not count, even if the customers all existed at the date. The evidence has to be capturable on the date, not reconstructible from memory.
Hierarchical preference. Where multiple pieces of evidence speak to the same question, the standard prefers the most recent transaction-level evidence: a recent priced round of a comparable peer outranks a six-month-old public-market multiple; a current funded pipeline of named customers outranks a forecast. Section 2.5 codified the hierarchy explicitly.
The single most common failure mode is the assumption that what matters is the substance of the evidence, not its timing. It isn't. Section 2.5 makes timing the gating test. Three patterns produce avoidable losses:
The retrospective brag. A founder marks a soft quarter with the argument: "but we signed a £2m enterprise customer two weeks after quarter end." The Fund's valuation committee cannot count this. The customer became known after the measurement date.
The "everybody knew" claim. A founder argues that a strategic partnership was effectively in place by the measurement date even though the contract was signed afterwards. The IPEV standard requires demonstrable knowledge — and "demonstrable" means dated artefact, not collective recollection.
The reconstructed pipeline. A founder produces a pipeline view six months after the measurement date that shows what was in the pipeline at the date. The Fund tests whether the pipeline view was itself captured contemporaneously. If not, it is excluded.
The remedy is operational: the strongest founders run their internal evidence cadence the same way a Fund runs its valuation cadence. Every material customer win, partnership signature, regulatory milestone, and engineering achievement is captured the day it happens, dated, and lodged in the appropriate data-room folder.
Five categories of evidence carry the most weight at a Fair Value committee. Founders who instrument these contemporaneously give the Fund the strongest possible defence at every subsequent mark.
| Category | What it is | What "contemporaneous" looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Customer evidence | Signed contracts, dated invoices, cohort retention, NRR | Customer master with creation dates; cohort cuts produced quarterly; signed contracts in the data room |
| Pipeline evidence | Named opportunities with stage, value, probability | Pipeline snapshot taken on the last day of each quarter and lodged |
| Technology evidence | Architecture diagrams, IP filings, key-engineer commits | Dated architecture documents; patent application receipts; commit history exported quarterly |
| Brand evidence | Trademarks, search-volume data, third-party brand mentions | Trademark certificates; dated Google Trends exports; press archive |
| Organisational evidence | Key-employee retention, hiring funnel, EMI scheme docs | Quarterly headcount and tenure reports; signed employment contracts in the data room |
For founders, the implementation question is not "what evidence is true" but "what evidence is captured." The best evidence is the evidence that exists as a timestamped artefact at the moment the fact becomes true.
Example. A founder's Series B is priced in Q1 at a 12× ARR multiple. In Q3, the public-market SaaS basket has compressed 18%. The Fund's valuation committee considers a partial write-down. The founder produces a Q3 cohort-retention snapshot showing 132% net revenue retention, up from 118% at the round close — dated, exported from the company's data warehouse on the last day of Q3, lodged in the data room. The Fund holds the mark flat: the retained-customer expansion mechanically offsets the basket-multiple compression. A competing portfolio company with the same retention but no contemporaneous Q3 snapshot is marked down 14%. The retention was real in both cases. Only one was demonstrable under Section 2.5.
Five operational practices give a founder a Section-2.5-compliant evidence base without disrupting normal operations.
1. Quarterly evidence drop. On the last business day of each quarter, the company exports a standard set of artefacts — cohort retention, ARR by customer cohort, pipeline snapshot, headcount and tenure, key-engineer commits, patent and trademark filings, customer NPS — and lodges them in the data room with the date in the file name. Total time: 30-60 minutes per quarter once the cadence is established.
2. Customer master discipline. Every customer record has a creation date, a contract-signed date, and a first-invoice date. These three dates are immutable once set. The discipline is on the date fields, not on the customer information.
3. Pipeline snapshot. A read-only copy of the sales pipeline is captured at quarter end and never edited. The snapshot itself is the evidence — not the live pipeline view.
4. Engineering velocity export. Commit history, story-point burndown, deployment frequency — all exported and lodged. This evidence supports both technology valuation and organisational capital claims.
5. Brand evidence archive. Google Trends export for branded queries, third-party press mentions, trademark certificates, SEO ranking snapshots. Each is captured at the moment it becomes true and dated.
The five practices together cost the company roughly half a day per quarter and produce an evidence base that survives any Section 2.5 audit. For a founder preparing for a Series B or exit, the cumulative effect across eight quarters is decisive.
The auditor checks three things at each annual audit of a Fund's portfolio. Founders who understand the audit perspective build packs that pass cleanly.
Audit test 1 — Evidence date integrity. Were the artefacts in the data room demonstrably created on or before the measurement date? File metadata, audit logs, and version histories are checked. A document with a creation date after the measurement date is rejected even if the substance is accurate.
Audit test 2 — Evidence completeness. Does the evidence base cover all the categories the valuation technique requires? A DCF that relies on a 25% gross margin needs the gross margin evidence in the data room. The absence of evidence on a load-bearing input is itself a flag.
Audit test 3 — Evidence consistency. Is the evidence consistent across the valuation pack? Customer counts in the cohort retention export should match customer counts in the management accounts. Inconsistencies trigger a deeper audit and often a re-mark.
Opagio is built around the known-and-knowable evidence standard. The platform captures intangible asset evidence at the moment it becomes true, dates it, and produces the timestamped artefacts that survive a Section 2.5 audit. This is not a coincidence — the architecture was designed against the IPEV standard rather than against generic content-management requirements.
For founders, the practical implication is that adopting an evidence cadence is a multi-year operating discipline, not a documentation push at round close. Funds notice the difference within two quarters.
Warning. The single most expensive evidence failure is the absence of cohort retention data at the round close. Cohort retention is the load-bearing input for nearly every SaaS Fair Value mark. A founder who closes a round without a clean cohort-retention export gives up 10-20% of the valuation range on day one.
This is the fourth piece in the IPEV Founder Series and closes the four-part frame.
Together they map onto the four lenses of the Round Readiness Diagnostic, which scores founders against the 2025 IPEV bar in eight minutes and routes each gap to the operating evidence that closes it.
Further reading. Known and Knowable Evidence, Data Room, Round-Ready Academy Lesson 5: Building the Series A Asset Register.
Next step. Run the Round Readiness Diagnostic. The diagnostic surfaces the five evidence categories above as discrete gaps and routes each to the operating cadence that closes it.
Mark Hillier is Co-Founder and CCO of Opagio. Thirty years of commercial growth and private equity exit preparation. Opagio builds the intangible asset evidence platform that institutional investors expect. About the team →
Calibration is the IPEV discipline that converts a transaction price into an ongoing defensible Fair Value. Section 4 of the 2025 Guidelines made it the load-bearing concept of the whole framework. The founders who supply calibration evidence at the round close — multiples, peer comparables, drift indicators — give the Fund the bridge it needs to defend the entry valuation at every subsequent quarter.
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Maintainable earnings is the figure the Fund actually values you on, and it is rarely the EBITDA at the bottom of your management accounts. Section 3.4 of the 2025 IPEV Guidelines made the reconciliation between management figures and maintainable earnings a required step. Founders who supply the reconciliation defend a higher number; founders who don't, watch the Fund build a lower one.
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Sophisticated investors run a Fair Value model on you for years after the round closes — and the offer at term sheet reflects that model, not the pitch deck. Founders who build the evidence base before the room walk in defending a number, not optimising one. The 2025 IPEV Valuation Guidelines tightened the bar; the founders who notice will price their rounds at the top of the range.
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