The Impact of Venture Capital on Deep-Tech Startup’s Growth : An Empirical analysis on Startups leaving University Incubators

Sammanfattning: Venture capital is associated with some of the most rapidly growing and influential technological companies. The strengths of the venture capital model have been effectively articulated by academics and policymakers. At the same time, venture capital financing became increasingly influential in the deep technology startup ecosystem, and there was a need to investigate the industry's growth impact of financing. Hence, this thesis focuses on the research area that is initiated by Industrifonden, an early-stage venture capital fund in Sweden. This study has chosen to investigate and answer the growth impact analysis in two key areas: timing (is timing of financing an independent factor for the growth of deep tech startups?) and sector based financing (Is Venture capital financing sector based?). The data comes from a cohort of startups (143 startups from 2010 to 2019) that are representative of deep-tech and non-deep-tech firms in Sweden, according to the Retriever Business Database in association with KTH Library. As the performance can be explained through the growth of the firms, the result shows that timing of funding has a statistically significant impact on the growth of the firm. The findings indicate a higher positive correlation between timing and startups’ growth, but sector based financing is statistically insignificant for deep tech startup growth.