Mentor Partners has made a strategic investment in StatTrader, an on-line private company database and confidential trading exchange for key financial and operating data of privately-held companies in the U.S.

More than 8,500 publicly-held companies in the U.S. report data to the SEC via their electronic annual and quarterly filings of their financial results, providing information related to capitalization, sales and revenue, and operating expense. This information is processed by StatTrader to provide a level of valuation transparency and an assessment of operating performance and risk over time.

But there is a far larger universe of U.S. companies - approximately 30 million - that are privately held. None of these report any financial and operating data. As a result, confidence in private company financial data, business valuation and performance and risk assessment is virtually impossible to determine, rendering independent comparison and valuation merely a 'best guess' at any point in time.

To address this issue, StatTrader developed a patented process for trading private company financial and operating information while maintaining the confidentiality of the company by protecting company-specific data from identification. The system uses public company accounting taxonomies to create a common platform for statistical comparison - between all companies public and private.

For the first time, StatTrader provides owners, investors, financial professionals such as accountants and business appraisers, among others, the confidence required for them to freely develop, trade and compare financial and operating data with peer firms and industries in the U.S.

StatTrader estimates that an obvious universe of more than 450,000 professionals would have use of StatTrader data, statistics, trading and networking capabilities, suggesting a market for the service of between $200 million and $1 billion annually at full development.

Click here to learn more and join StatTrader now.