The Multiple on Invested Capital (MOIC) — also called the investment multiple or money-on-money multiple — measures the total value created by an investment as a simple ratio to capital deployed. A 3.0x MOIC means an investor received three dollars back for every dollar invested.
MOIC is intuitive and easy to calculate but ignores time — a 3.0x return achieved in two years is far superior to the same multiple achieved over ten years. For this reason, MOIC and IRR are typically presented together. At the fund level, MOIC is expressed as TVPI (Total Value to Paid-In). A realised multiple (only counting distributed cash) is expressed as DPI; the remaining unrealised component is RVPI (Residual Value to Paid-In).