Venture Capitalists’ Investment Decision Criteria for New Ventures: A Review

Abstract

Venture Capitalists (VCs) play the most crucial role to identify high potential and innovative firms. However, VCs adopt different criteria to evaluate the incipient ventures before funding. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the comprehensive literature of the VCs investment evaluation criteria. This study provides a critical review of the conceptual and empirical approaches focusing on how VCs make their investment decision and what are the key influential factors at the times of investment. The critical examination highlights that not all the VCs able to follow the same investment decision process for evaluating new ventures. Some VCs give more importance to entrepreneur’s characteristics, while others are more intrigued with financial and marketing perspectives. Thus, findings reveal that VCs follow multi-criteria perspective of the decision-making. This study discusses the various issues and suggestions for future research. The results of the study are useful for both venture capitalists in their decision-making process and entrepreneurs in their venture capital applications to maximize their success rate.