How to read a defense tech cap table: rounds, ownership, and 'estimated' figures

A cap table (capitalization table) is a record of who owns what percentage of a company, and how that ownership has changed across funding rounds. For a public company, this is disclosed in regulatory filings. For a private company — which is most of defense tech — it almost never is, which is why cap table data has to be reconstructed rather than simply looked up.

Current cap table vs. round-by-round history

A current cap table is a snapshot: who owns the company today, and roughly what share. A round-by-round history is different — it shows the same information at each historical raise (Seed, Series A, Series B, and so on), which lets you see dilution over time and how a specific investor's stake shifted as new rounds came in. The current snapshot answers "who owns this company now." The round history answers "how did we get here."

Why some figures are marked "Estimated" rather than "Verified"

Very little private-company ownership data is disclosed outright. What is usually public: the size of a round, the valuation attached to it (sometimes), and which investors participated. From those three data points, an approximate ownership percentage can be derived — if a fund led a $50M round at a $200M post-money valuation and the round size implies a certain dilution, its resulting stake can be estimated even without an explicit disclosure. That's a real estimate grounded in public numbers, but it's not the same confidence level as an ownership percentage taken directly from an SEC filing or an investor's own disclosure. Conflating the two would overstate how precisely private ownership can actually be known.

What "Verified," "Reported," and "Estimated" mean in practice

• Verified: the figure comes directly from a primary source — a regulatory filing, an official company disclosure, or similar.
• Reported: the figure comes from reputable secondary reporting (industry press, analyst coverage) with attribution, but isn't a primary disclosure.
• Estimated: the figure is derived from public signals — round size, valuation, and known participants — and should be treated as directional rather than exact.

A cap table with a mix of all three labels isn't a sign of incomplete work — it's an accurate reflection of how much of this information is genuinely knowable from public sources at any given time. Treating every private-company ownership figure as equally certain is the more common mistake. See the methodology page for the full verification process, or browse company records to see labelled cap tables in practice.