Free Cash Flow Multiples in IPO Valuation

I am trying to understand FCF based multiples and IPO valuations. If a company has a sizable amount of leverage I imagine investors / research analysts would look at levered FCF rather than unlevered FCF. I believe EV/FCF multiples have to use unlevered FCF as Enterprise Value is a capital structure agnostic metric and the FCF metric would need to be unlevered as well.

The area I am getting confused on is that I looked through a handful of research reports that used Ev/FCF valuation, where they calc FCF starting with net income, walking down to cash from operations (CFO) and then taking out capex. Isn't net income a levered number, such that you couldn't use that FCF metric in an EV/FCF multiple? (to clarify, at no point in getting from NI to CFO did they add back the interest expenses).

Any thoughts? Am I missing something here? The reports I looked at had some leverage (i.e. they weren't no leverage businesses)