Track: Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Abstract

Approaching and accessing appropriate sources of finance are among the significant challenges for a tech startup throughout its lifecycle. However, entrepreneurial finance literature lacks clarity on the factors driving a tech startup to access a particular source of finance. This study contributes to the entrepreneurial finance literature by ascertaining the factors leading a tech startup to approach a financial source and investigating how these factors vary over its lifecycle. Binary logistic regression algorithm was employed to analyse the research objective on the primary and secondary data collected from 93 tech startups in Bangalore. Our results indicate that a tech startup’s choice for a financial source varies with its financial requirements. We identified three significant natures of financial requirements: Human Capital (HC), Research Capital (RC), and Social Capital (SC). Of these three, the financial requirement to acquire RC is financed by most investors, including both early stage investors (Business Angel (BA)) and growth stage investors: Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) and Private Equity (PE) firm. However, the requirement to acquire HC and SC predominantly lead a startup to approach a Venture Capital (VC) firm.