Venture Fund Exit Strategy

This paper explores the determinants of a VC-backed company exit: IPO or the sale to a strategic investor. The work uses a sample consisting of data of investment rounds and macroeconomic indicators. The main scientific novelty of the work is the analysis of the data of investment rounds, rather than the private data of venture companies or start-ups. According to the results of the research, positively statistically significant variables for VC-backed company IPO in comparison with selling to a strategic investor are: the company's price, the volume of investments, the number of rounds, the average size of the round, the growth rate of GDP and the amount of investment in the Seed and Startup rounds. At the same time negatively significant variables are: CoC return, the level of development of the venture market of the country, the growth rate of the M&A market, the growth rate of foreign investments, and the company's achievements of the Seed and Startup rounds. Among other things, some variables turned out to be significant and have a quadratic form of influence on the explained variable: the number of years until the last round, the speed of getting new rounds. The results are consistent with some early studies. And it allows to broaden the understanding of the issue. Moreover, The results obtained by machine learning is consistent with logit-regression results, which allows to extend the set of tools for further analysis in the work, or in several data gaps or a private, closed nature. This study is a continuation of a number of studies of this topic. It can also become a base for further analysis of this topic.