4. Results
4.1. Descriptive results
Table 2 shows descriptive statistics. Our sample comprises 427 funding rounds from 299 start-ups. Our dependent variable amount of VC funding has a mean value of 4.337 million USD (range: 0.001–55.0). This large spectrum of funding received during one funding round underlines the heterogeneity among startups regarding funding requirements. This result seems to reflect the large differences in the start-up's age at the time of funding and in the number of employees (firm size), but it could also be due to differences in the start-up's business model and strategy. The start-ups in our sample had on average 9.58 patent and 1.41 trademark applications prior to their funding. However, as the medians show, the majority of start-ups did not hold any patent or trademark applications prior to funding. The standard deviations and the minimum and maximum values reveal that there exist large differences in the numbers of patents and trademarks among the firms in our sample. The distribution of patent applications among start-ups is more heterogeneous than that of trademark applications. We thus decided to use dummy variables for trademark and patent applications in our analysis. Concerning the business model characteristics, we observed that 24.4% of the start-ups focused solely on services, whereas a high number of firms considered product innovation very important and used umbrella branding. This observation makes sense because start-ups are considered very innovative and, furthermore, only commercialize a limited amount of products in the beginning, which makes the use of an umbrella brand a reasonable choice. In addition, we find that the majority of investments took place between 2010 and 2012 and that the majority of investors are financial organizations. Regarding the industry sector, we find the most prominent ones to be ‘web’, ‘software’, and ‘biotechnology’.
