Internal R&D · living plan · inferno

The IPO Scorecard

status: engine drafted → wiring the private-market signal · last updated 2026-08-05 · not investment advice · internal only

Roughly 70% of companies that IPO trade below their offer within a couple of years. The scorecard's whole job is to separate the ~30% that rise from the ~70% that fade. The edge isn't the prospectus — everyone has that. It's that we can see the private history in MARS: every round, every backer, equity vs debt, the valuation path. That private lens is what a public-filing-only read can't see.

01 · The thesis

The prospectus is the story they tell. MARS is the story they lived.

Two IPOs can file near-identical prospectuses and have opposite private trajectories — an up-round vs a down-round, tier-1 crossover backers vs no-name money, equity-funded growth vs a debt-financed buildout. The public offering hides all of it; MARS surfaces it. The scorecard turns that asymmetry into a grade.

📉 The base rate we're fighting. Most IPOs are net losers over 1–2 years. A scorecard that just says "great growth story!" reproduces the 70%. To find the 30% you need signals that discriminate — and the most discriminating ones live in the private history and the offering mechanics, not the pitch.

02 · The scorecard — and a worked example

CoreWeave, graded

The dimensions, scored on a real, marquee IPO — CoreWeave (CRWV), IPO 2025-03-31 at $40 (deal $1.7B). The point isn't the grade; it's that the scorecard surfaces a tension a headline read misses — elite backing wrapped around a debt-funded balance sheet:

DimensionGradeWhat the data says
Backer pedigreeMARS · who + when A Elite. Pre-IPO Series C ($1.1B) led by Coatue, Altimeter, Fidelity, Magnetar; the IPO itself anchored by NVIDIA (strategic — whose chips they buy). Top-decile validation.
Capital structureMARS · equity vs debt D Debt-financed buildout. Of ~12 verified rounds, nearly all are Debt / Convertible Debt — ~$2.3B pre-IPO and a ~$19.7B torrent after (incl. a single $8.5B facility). Only one true equity round in the trajectory. Structurally fragile if the AI-capex cycle wobbles.
Offering mechanicssections · 424B4 C Proceeds go to debt, not growth. ~$1.0B of net proceeds to repay a term loan + $0.5B to a debt escrow. Dual-class 10:1 founder control. 180-day lockup (expired 2025-09-27).
Financials trajectorysections · prospectus Extraction gap — the prospectus financials weren't pulled for this issuer (no_financials_extracted). Falls back to the post-IPO 10-Q. A real coverage hole to close.
Post-IPO catalystslockup · insider · 13F next Lockup-expiry supply, insider behavior at unlock, institutional 13F uptake — the dimension that turns a static grade into a time-series. Roadmap.

The read: CRWV scores top-decile on backing and bottom-decile on balance-sheet fragility — a high-conviction, high-leverage bet on the AI-capex cycle continuing. That tension is the honest output, and it's exactly the nuance the 30/70 split needs — invisible to anyone reading only the "hot AI IPO" narrative.

03 · Why this works — the private-market edge

The signal lives where the prospectus doesn't

The core insight

Capital structure and backer quality are the discriminators — and only MARS has them

A prospectus tells you the deal size and the risk factors everyone else reads. MARS tells you how the company was actually financed and by whom — the equity/debt mix, the tier of the backers, the up-round/down-round path. Those are the features that separate survivors from faders, and they're structurally unavailable to a public-filing-only competitor. That's the moat, same as the graph: depth = domain × extraction × linkage.

Design principle

Code owns the grade; the model owns the narrative

Every grade is deterministic — backer tier, debt/equity ratio, use-of-proceeds split, insider-sell % are computed, not vibed. The model writes the story around the numbers; it never invents them. Same discipline that keeps the report builder honest.

04 · The data stack

What feeds each grade

MARS funding backing + structure

mars_funding_history / investor_portfolio — every round, backer tier, equity-vs-debt. The two hardest-to-replicate dimensions.

sections · IPO offering deal mechanics

sections__ipo_offering — use of proceeds, dual-class, lockup schedule, greenshoe. 98% of the IPO universe.

sections · IPO financials trajectory

sections__ipo_financials — prospectus revenue/margin/burn (mind extraction gaps → post-IPO 10-Q fallback).

sections · risk factors red flags

sections__ipo_risk_factors — classified risk language (going-concern, concentration, dilution).

insider + 13F post-IPO

Lockup-expiry behavior + institutional uptake — the catalyst dimension.

05 · Caveats & PIT discipline

Where it can lie to us

06 · Status & next steps

Engine drafted; wiring the private signal

Then: close the financials extraction gap (10-Q fallback), add the post-IPO catalyst dimension (lockup/insider/13F), and ship the section into the served report engine.

THE IPO SCORECARD — living plan, maintained by inferno. Companion to The Earnings Transformer. Built from the MARS funding vertical + argos sections IPO tools, point-in-time. Worked example (CoreWeave) is illustrative of method, not a recommendation; grades are relative flags, not verdicts. Not investment advice. Internal — not for external distribution.