Exploration of Financial Valuation Factors of Startup Companies

This research focuses on the factors of startup valuation for firms, in which invested corporate VC funds. The review of valuation literature is accompanied by strategic management approaches, identifying factors, influencing startup valuation such as firm’s characteristics: industry in which it performs, product differentiation, age of the startup, complexity of management team; macroeconomic factors, such as events of high uncertainty, investors’ sentiments and network, training, promotion of human resources. The dataset collected from Pitchbook database includes data on CVC funded startups, not older than 7 years, last investment data of which is 2018. 95 deal data of top 20 CVC funds was regressed on both pre- and post-money valuation. The result proved positive and significant relationship between deal size and valuation, number of employees and valuation, and negative and significant relationship between number of investors and EV of the startup, thus bringing results opposite to Masulis and Nahata (2009) study. Further research can be conducted replicating the model on higher number of observations, as data scarcity was main econometric challenge.