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Staged financing is a prominent feature of the venture capital investment process. With staged financing, venture capitalists (VCs) may choose to either make an investment or delay it at each round. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of market uncertainty, project-specific uncertainty and agency problems on these decisions.

The study uses data from Indian firms that received venture capital funding between 2000 and 2017. The duration between funding rounds is analysed using survival analysis. An accelerated failure time model is used to estimate the influence of market uncertainty, project-specific uncertainty and agency problems on the length of time between funding rounds.

VCs delay investment when there are high levels of uncertainty in the market; if market uncertainty increases by 1%, delay in funding increases by more than 6% (almost a month) on average. There is no statistically significant relationship found between the funding duration and project-specific uncertainty. Agency problems motivate VCs to invest sooner. An increase in agency problems results in a reduction of 55% (almost five months) in the length of time before the next funding round.

This study has useful business policy implications. It provides VCs with real option value drivers such as market uncertainty, agency problems, which influence the timing of decisions in staged investment processes. It will help to make the choice between investing and delaying at each round of financing more robust. Further, it is useful for VCs to differentiate between market uncertainty and agency problems against the backdrop of their different implications for staging decisions.

Few studies have examined staging decisions from a real options perspective in the context of a developed economy and very few from a developing economy perspective. This study increases understanding of staging decisions in the Indian context.

This paper aims to explain the fundraising and valuation processes of startups and discuss the conflicts of interest between entrepreneurs, venture capital (VC) firms and stakeholders in the context of startup corporate governance. Further, this paper uses the examples of WeWork and Zenefits to explain how a failure of stakeholders to demand an external audit from an independent accounting firm in early stages of funding led to an opportunity for fraud.

The methodology used is a literature review and analysis of startup valuation combined with the Fraud Triangle Theory. This paper also provides a discussion of WeWork and Zenefits, both highly visible examples of startup fraud, and explores an increased role for independent external auditors in fraud risk mitigation on behalf of stakeholders prior to an initial public offering (IPO).

This paper documents a number of fraud risks posed by the “fake it till you make it” ethos and investor behavior and pricing in the world of entrepreneurial finance and VC, which could be mitigated by a greater awareness of startup stakeholders of the value of an external audit performed by an independent accounting firm prior to an IPO.

An implication of this paper is that regulators should consider greater oversight of the startup financing process and potentially take steps to facilitate greater independence of participants in the IPO process.

Given the potential conflicts of interest between VC firms, investment banks and startup founders, the investors at the time of an IPO may be exposed to the risk that the shares of the IPO firms are overvalued at offering.

This study demonstrates how startup practices can be extended to the Fraud Triangle and issue a call to action for the accounting profession to take a greater role in protecting the public from startup fraud. This study then offers recommendations for regulators and standards entities.

There are few academic papers in the financial crime literature that link the valuation and culture of startup firms with fraud risk. This study provides a concise explanation of the process of valuation for startups and highlights the considerations for stakeholders in assessing fraud risk. In addition, this study documents an emerging role for auditors as stewards of proper valuation for pre-IPO firms.

The purpose of this paper is twofold to examine the factors that contribute to local bias of venture capital in China and to explore the relationship between local bias and performance of venture capital institutions.

Local bias was measured in line with the model developed by Cumming and Dai (2010). Regression techniques were performed for our long-term cross-sectional data to analyse the potential determinants of local bias. This is followed by the Probit model to test the relationship between local preference and successful exit.

The overall finding indicated that local bias in China increased over time. The stiff competition among venture capital institutions reduced local bias, but the enhanced innovation capabilities of a particular geographical area amplified local bias because of the knowledge spillover effect. Finally, the results suggested that venture capital institutions with less local bias enjoy a greater likelihood of making successful exits.

This study used successful venture capital exit as a proxy for venture capital institution’s performance because of the unavailability of information such as internal rate of return. Future research should try to adopt other way of measuring venture capital institution’s performance.

This study sheds light on the various possible causes of local bias that the policymakers need to be aware of. Despite the rapid rise of China’s venture capital market in recent years, venture capital institutions have yet to make inroads into the local high-tech industry. This study implies to the policymakers that to reverse this trend, they should formulate policies that foster the long-term performance of venture capital institutions, mitigate the severity of local bias and raise the competitiveness of the Chinese venture capital market.

Because of data limitations, there is currently lack of prior empirical research on local bias of Chinese venture capital institutions based on large-scale data. This study intends to fill the gap.

The paper aims to investigate the views of Estonian private equity and venture capitalists about the valuation of high‐growth companies and compare these with theoretical recommendations found in corporate finance and venture capital literature.

The analysis was carried out by using the case study methodology. Structured interviews were conducted in order to present the material for analysis. The dominant model of the case study analysis is exploratory, using an explanation‐building and pattern‐matching technique.

Main findings of the empirical study show that Estonian private equity and venture capitalists make the valuation somewhat differently compared to Western European and American ones. Some findings do not confirm the suggestions made by scientists.

Some of the required data were considered to be a business secret. The research could be extended to a broader sample.

The findings can be used by the managers of private equity and venture capital funds for choosing appropriate cost of capital and valuation model for venture capital projects.

The paper is the first empirical paper, investigating how Estonian private equity and venture capitalists make the valuation of target companies.

This study aims to investigate the use of convertible securities and control rights covenants for a sample of 53 Portuguese, Spanish and German venture capital (VC) firms.

A relatively new methodology in business sciences – a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis – that considers both quantitative and qualitative factors is used for obtaining a solution that best fits the empirical data.

The results show that the use of convertible securities is affected by agency predictions, namely, the anticipated severity of double-sided moral hazard problems. On the other hand, a mixed support is provided to the agency predictions regarding the use of control right covenants. The results seem to suggest that control right covenants tend to play a different role from convertible securities in the optimization of contract design for VC-backed investments.

Existing literature on VC contract design is extended by providing a cross-border analysis to VC financing decision.

The purpose of this paper aims to investigate micro enterprises financing in Indonesia and examines how this financing differs, depending on the enterprise’s development stage. This research also identifies some structural problems related to micro-financing and provides workable solutions.

This research uses the entrepreneurial network model of Schutjens and Stam (2003) to examine how Indonesian micro and small enterprises (MSEs) evolve even before they become regular small businesses. Content analysis is used on 10 micro-enterprises from Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia and its surroundings. Financing issues at each stage of enterprise development are identified and deeply examined.

This research not only confirms the significant financing problems micro-enterprises face but also clarifies that these problems are unique to each stage of the MSEs’ development. One insight is that most micro-enterprises do not use funding from formal institutions. That is, business owners rely more on funding from non-formal institutions. This is because these enterprises’ managers generally cannot prepare loans application and/or they are lack of knowledge/training on financing matters. They hesitate to borrow from formal financial institutions, as the rates are high but the processing time is longer than those of the loan sharks.

This research contributes to the field of entrepreneurial finance by identifying the structural problems inherent in micro-finance and providing workable solutions for overcoming these problems.

This chapter analyses how capital is raised and employed by a sample of 28 European biotechnology companies listed on Europe’s new stock markets from 1996 to 2000. We find that biotechnology companies rely heavily on IPO proceeds in order to finance their growth. We compare the behaviour of European firms to a sample of comparable U.S. firms. The analysis reveals that European companies tend to raise more capital at the IPO and to invest more aggressively in the short-run, whereas U.S. biotech firms tend to have more cash available before the IPO and invest more conservatively in the short-run.

Policymakers have long supported the development of venture capital markets on the basis that venture capital fills a perceived gap in the availability of early stage seed capital funding for new technology-based firms (NTBFs).¹ Support from policymakers, however, has not been matched by academic research on NTBF financing. This is a major concern because NTBF financing is not well understood. The theoretical focus of this chapter is the life cycle or stage model of financing, which has proved the dominate paradigm in the analysis of financing in NTBFs. It is particularly relevant to this study, as the stage model is explicitly endorsed by venture capitalists who structure deals in phases in order to effectively monitor the investee firm's progress (Sahlman, 1990).

The venture capital and private equity (VCPE) industry in India has grown significantly in recent years. During five‐year period 2004‐2008, the industry growth rate in India was the fastest globally and it rose to occupy the number three slot worldwide in terms of quantum of investments. However, academic research on the Indian VCPE industry has been limited. This paper seeks to fill the gap in research on the recent trends in the Indian VCPE industry.

Studies on the VCPE transactions have traditionally focused on one of the components of the investment lifecycle, i.e. investments, monitoring, or exit. This study is based on analyzing the investment life cycle in its entirety, from the time of investment by the VCPE fund till the time of exit. The analysis was based on a total of 1,912 VCPE transactions involving 1,503 firms during the years 2004‐2008.

Most VCPE investments were in late stage financing and took place many years after the incorporation of the investee firm. The industry was also characterized by the short duration of the investments. The type of exit was well predicted by the type of industry, financing stage, region of investment, and type of VCPE fund.

This paper highlights some of the key areas to ensure sustainable growth of the industry. Early stage funding opportunities should be increased to ensure that there is a strong pipeline of investment opportunities for late stage investors. VCPE investments should be seen as long‐term investments and not as “quick flips”. To achieve this, it is important to have a strong domestic VCPE industry which can stay invested in the portfolio company for a longer term.

This paper analyzes the importance given by venture capital (VC) firms to the different characteristics of the patent portfolio of a young innovative company (YIC). In an attempt to go beyond previous studies, the authors argue that not only is the size of a technological portfolio significant but also its nature. It is also examined whether the correlation between patents and VC financing varies across different industrial sectors and over different rounds of VC investments.

The empirical analysis has focused on a sample of 1,096 European YICs between the years 2010 and 2014. Target companies were identified in the monthly bulletins of Go4Venture, which reported the largest European deals and gathered information on the amount of VC financing. Additional data was derived from FinSMEs and crunchbase. Industrial sectors were differentiated according to their ability to appropriate the returns of innovation by relying on patent protection mechanisms. A multivariate regression framework at the patent family level was adopted to investigate empirical associations between the amount of VC financing and the characteristics of a YIC's patent portfolio.

The results confirm the positive value of patents. Both the size and the characteristics of a YIC patent portfolio have been found to be positively associated with the total amount of VC financing. Additionally, the correlation between a YIC patent portfolio and VC investment varies across industries and over rounds of funding. Although the number of patents is positively correlated with VC investments in sectors with strong Intellectual Property (IP) regimes, the same does not apply to sectors characterized by lower patent intensity, where qualitative metrics seem to have a stronger correlation. Significant differences have also been found for the different rounds of VC investments.

The limitations of this paper are related to data availability. Empirical associations have been investigated, but causal effects cannot be ascertained in this framework. The authors focused on a sample of firms that received VC funding. Several transactions were excluded, due to a lack of specifications pertaining to the round series. Furthermore, a number of potential drivers of the financed amounts, such as variables related to the founder or the management team, have not been considered in this study.

For firms operating in sectors with weak IP regimes, patents are positively associated with attracting equity capital, if they are the output of R&D collaborations and have higher technical merit. In industries where patent intensity is higher, patent portfolio size matters more than quality. This suggests that VC investors award innovation quality to cases in which patenting is less frequent. Since the results indicate that positive associations between patenting and VC financing are more significant in later stages, managers should plan their patenting strategy in advance to reap the related benefits, and then collect the premium at later VC stages.

In this paper, the importance given by VC firms to different characteristics of a YIC patent portfolio has been analyzed in terms of size, quality, and complexity. While previous empirical analyses mainly focused on a single sector, the authors have examined whether the relevance of patents for VC financing decisions varies across industries and over different rounds of investment. The geographical coverage of the sample is another novelty of the paper. Previous works focused on a limited number of countries, whereas this research has considered firms operating in several European countries.