Agronomics Limited (AIM: ANIC) is the closest thing the alternative protein sector has to a public price. It is a London-listed investment company holding stakes in more than twenty private clean-food businesses, and it publishes a net asset value every quarter. For anyone trying to work out what this sector’s assets are actually worth, that quarterly number is one of very few marks that exist at all.
It is worth understanding exactly what it is a mark of. From the announcement of 10 July 2026, in the company’s own words:
“Under IFRS, the Company’s unquoted investments are generally carried at cost or at the value of the most recent priced funding round.”
So the NAV is not an appraisal. It is a register of prices other investors paid, held at those prices until somebody else pays a different one. It moves when a portfolio company raises money, when a currency moves, or when a company dies — and not otherwise.
At 30 June 2026 that produced a NAV of 12.93 pence per share and net assets of £140,030,162. On the same date the shares closed at 5.64 pence, a 56% discount. The average discount over the preceding twelve months was 49%.
The mark and the market
| Date | NAV per share | Net assets | Share price | Discount to NAV | 12-month average discount |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30 June 2025 (audited FY) | 12.34p | total assets £124.7m | not stated in source | not stated in source | not stated in source |
| 31 December 2025 | 13.78p | not stated in sources read | not stated in sources read | not stated in sources read | not stated in sources read |
| 31 March 2026 | 13.12p | £138,648,929 | 6.32p | 52% | 50% |
| 30 June 2026 | 12.93p | £140,030,162 | 5.64p | 56% | 49% |
Sources: Agronomics RNS of 18 May 2026 and 10 July 2026 for the two 2026 quarters; Sharecast report of 30 December 2025 for the audited year. The 31 December 2025 NAV per share is taken from the comparative in the 31 March 2026 announcement; we did not read that quarter’s own announcement, hence the blank cells.
Two things are worth pulling out of that table before anything else.
First, the discount widened between March and June even though NAV per share barely moved — from 52% to 56% — because the share price fell from 6.32p to 5.64p while NAV per share fell only 0.19p. The market did not disagree with the marks by more; it simply paid less.
Second, the twelve-month average discount is 49–50% in both quarters. This is not a recently-opened gap that might close on a single piece of good news. It is the standing state of the security.
Practical consequence. If you are using Agronomics’ NAV as a read-across for what a private alt-protein stake is worth, you are using a number the only people actually transacting in it have discounted by half for a year. Use it as a floor on what somebody once paid, not as an estimate of what anybody would pay now.
What actually moves the number
The June quarter is a clean illustration of the mechanism, because the company itemises it.
NAV rose by about £1.5 million over the quarter, while NAV per share fell 1.5%. Both are true at once, and the reason is disclosed: Agronomics settled a US$5 million investment into SuperMeat’s Series A-4 by issuing 26,805,903 new ordinary shares worth £3.7 million. More assets, more shares, less per share.
The itemised drivers for the quarter were:
| Driver | Effect on NAV | Disclosed amount |
|---|---|---|
| Shares issued to settle the US$5m SuperMeat investment | increase | £3.7m of shares issued |
| Downward fair value adjustment to Meatly, following its Series A1 round of £1.2m | decrease | not quantified |
| Unrealised FX loss on USD, EUR and AUD holdings | decrease | £0.8m |
| Unrealised fair value gain on Solar Foods Oy (quoted, Nasdaq First North) | increase | £0.1m |
| Cash used for running costs, net of interest income | decrease | £0.3m (£12k cash interest received; £43k loan note interest accrued) |
The quantified items net to roughly +£2.7 million against a stated increase of about £1.5 million. The only unquantified item is the Meatly adjustment, which implies a write-down of the order of £1.2 million. That is our arithmetic, not a disclosed figure — the announcement does not state the size of the Meatly adjustment, and we are inferring it as the residual.
The Meatly line is the more interesting one regardless of its size, because of what caused it. Meatly, per the same announcement, completed a £10.4 million Series A on 7 May 2026, taking its total funding to £17.5 million after £7.1 million of seed money from Agronomics and Pets at Home. A portfolio company raised eight figures — and the holder wrote its carrying value down.
That is the “most recent priced round” rule working exactly as designed and exactly as uncomfortably as it sounds. A round is a mark. Marks go both ways. Under this method, a successful raise at a lower price is indistinguishable, in the NAV, from a deterioration in the business.
Practical consequence. For founders: a down round inside a portfolio held by a listed vehicle becomes a public number within about ten weeks. For investors reading the NAV: an increase driven by a portfolio company raising capital tells you a price was set, not that value was created.
A note on the Meatly figures
The 10 July announcement uses three different numbers for Meatly in two adjacent passages: a “Series A1 funding round of £1.2 million” in the NAV movement bullets, a “£10.4 million Series A funding round” in the portfolio review, and a total of “£17.5 million” which reconciles as £7.1m seed plus £10.4m Series A — and therefore excludes the £1.2m. We are not able to say from this document whether the A1 is a separate round, a tranche within the Series A, or a labelling inconsistency. We have not resolved it, and neither does the announcement.
The audited numbers are from before the sector’s worst quarter
Agronomics’ financial year ends 30 June. Its most recent audited results, reported by Sharecast on 30 December 2025, cover the twelve months to 30 June — and on that publication date, the most recent completed financial year was the one ended 30 June 2025. Those accounts show:
- NAV per share of 12.34p, down from 15.58p the year before
- Total assets falling to £124.7m from £157.4m
- Net investment losses of £25.1m, against £8.3m the prior year
- A net operating loss of £32.7m, against an £11.0m profit previously
As of publication, we have found no audited results for the year ended 30 June 2026. That means the most recent audited picture of this portfolio is now fourteen months old, and the intervening information is four unaudited quarterly NAV announcements.
There is a further wrinkle in the audited year that we flag without resolving. Sharecast lists among the writedowns “a 11.9m complete writedown in its stake in Meatable, which went into liquidation” — but Meatable’s dissolution was announced on 19 December 2025, nearly six months after the 30 June 2025 balance sheet date, and eleven days before that report was published. Either the accounts treated the failure as an adjusting post-balance-sheet event, which is a legitimate and arguably correct treatment where the conditions existed at the reporting date, or the summary has folded a subsequent event into the period. We cannot tell from the sources we read, and the distinction matters to anyone reconciling the year.
Three numbers for one failure
Meatable itself generated a small case study in why this publication exists. Three different figures for the same event circulate, each measured differently:
| Figure | What it measures | As at | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| £11.9m | Carrying value written down to zero | not stated | TipRanks summary of the Agronomics RNS |
| £7.9m | Total cash Agronomics had invested | cumulative | TipRanks summary of the Agronomics RNS |
| ~8.1% | Share of Agronomics’ NAV represented by the carrying value | 30 September 2025 | TipRanks summary of the Agronomics RNS |
The gap between £11.9m and £7.9m is the accumulated uplift from Meatable’s earlier priced rounds — money that was never Agronomics’ money, marked into NAV because other investors set a higher price, and removed when the company dissolved. That is not a criticism of the accounting. It is the arithmetic of holding early-stage assets at the last round: gains you did not fund are recognised, and are then given back in full.
The percentage is measured at 30 September 2025, three months after the audited balance sheet date and three months before the write-off. We did not read the 30 September 2025 NAV announcement, and note that £11.9m at 8.1% implies net assets of roughly £147m on that date, which does not sit obviously alongside £124.7m of total assets three months earlier. We are not able to reconcile those two figures from the sources we read, and we flag it rather than pick one.
We should also be explicit that all three Meatable figures reach us through an auto-generated news summary of the original announcement, not the announcement itself. TipRanks labels the item as produced by its “UK Auto-Generated Newsdesk.” Anyone relying on those numbers should open the original ACCESS Newswire release, which we link.
Two smaller precision notes
Both quarterly announcements state figures in the narrative that do not match their own tables. The 31 March 2026 release says net assets “stand at £139 million, including investments of £138 million,” while its table gives investments of £136,793,745 — which is £136.8m, not £138m. The 30 June release says “investments of £138 million” against a table figure of £138,512,102. These are rounding and transcription slips in the narrative rather than errors in the accounts, but if you are building a series, take the tables.
There is also a reconciliation gap in the March quarter. The stated movement is a £1.3 million decrease in NAV. The three itemised drivers — a £2.1m FX gain, a £0.12m Solar Foods fair value loss, and £0.3m of net cash outflow — sum to roughly +£1.68 million. That is a swing of about £3 million that the announcement does not itemise. The announcement says the decrease “relates primarily to the following,” so it does not claim the list is exhaustive; but a reader reconstructing the quarter cannot complete the reconciliation from what is published.
The case against reading the discount as a verdict on the marks
A 56% discount looks like the market calling the NAV wrong by half. It may not be.
Closed-end vehicles holding illiquid private assets trade at structural discounts for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the marks are right: no redemption mechanism, thin secondary liquidity, a small register, and the certainty that realising the portfolio would take years and cost money. Agronomics’ investee stakes are minority positions in private companies with no obvious buyers; a rational holder would discount them for exit risk even while agreeing precisely with every carrying value.
The company’s own record cuts both ways here too. During the June quarter its portfolio companies did things that are unambiguously real progress rather than paper marks: All G received an FDA “no questions” letter for precision-fermented bovine lactoferrin on 1 April 2026; Bond Pet Foods received an FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine Letter of No Objection for its Lamb Protein Yeast on 4 June 2026; Tropic Biosciences won approvals in Japan and Brazil for a non-browning banana and then acquired Rahan Meristem for US$20 million. Executive Chair Jim Mellon’s framing — that the companies best positioned “are those translating scientific capability into commercial execution” — is a fair description of that list.
The honest reading is that the discount is doing at least three jobs at once: illiquidity, scepticism about the marks, and a view on the sector. Nothing in the public disclosure separates them.
What we could not establish
- Whether audited FY2026 results exist. We found no annual results for the year ended 30 June 2026 in the announcements we read, the most recent of which was dated 14 July 2026. We have not checked the company’s own RNS feed since, and cannot say the accounts have not been published.
- The year covered by the Sharecast report. It says “the 12 months to 30 June” without a year. We attribute it to the year ended 30 June 2025 on the basis of its 30 December 2025 publication date and Agronomics’ June year-end. We did not read the annual report itself.
- The size of the Meatly write-down. Derived by us as the residual, roughly £1.2 million. Not disclosed.
- Whether the £1.2m “Series A1” and the £10.4m “Series A” are the same round. Unresolved in the source document.
- The 30 September 2025 NAV, which is needed to reconcile the “8.1% of NAV” figure. Not read.
- Share counts. We infer approximately 1,056 million shares in issue at 31 March 2026 and 1,083 million at 30 June 2026 from the share capital line at £0.0001p par. The announcements print a “Shares in Issue” row with no number in it. Treat our figures as inferred.
- Market capitalisation. Two figures appear in secondary sources — £71.11m in December 2025 and “84.50M” with no currency stated in August 2026. We have not used either.
- Meatable’s total capital raised. NL Times reports a €30 million round in 2023, half from Invest-NL, and about 100 employees. Other figures circulate for the lifetime total. We did not verify any of them.
What to watch
- The FY2026 audited accounts, whenever they appear. They will be the first audited view that contains the Meatable failure unambiguously, and the first that can be reconciled against four quarters of unaudited NAV. If audited NAV per share lands materially away from 12.93p, the quarterly series was not doing the job readers assume it does.
- Whether any portfolio company transacts at a price rather than raising at one. Every number in this NAV comes from a primary funding round. A trade sale, a secondary, or a liquidation with proceeds would be the first evidence of what these assets fetch from a buyer rather than from a subscriber. Tropic’s US$20 million acquisition of Rahan Meristem shows a portfolio company paying a price for an asset; it does not show anyone paying a price for a portfolio company.
- Whether the discount narrows on operating news. All G’s GRAS letter and Bond’s Letter of No Objection landed inside the June quarter, and the shares fell from 6.32p to 5.64p across it. If regulatory clearances do not move the price, the discount is not about the marks and no amount of portfolio progress will close it.
Our earlier work found that alternative protein funding is narrowing rather than recovering, and that the acquirers of failed assets are mostly peers paying small sums. Agronomics is the same story told through a balance sheet: a portfolio whose value is defined entirely by rounds other people price, in a market where fewer rounds are being priced each year.