If you ever wanted to find funding or maybe a company to invest in, you definitely thought about introduction and communication. Unicorn Nest analytics did a massive survey to understand introduction principles and ready to share them.  A startup needs to know that there is no one most efficient way: all funds have different ways of getting an introduction for a startup. For instance, 22% of responding funds get the most introductions through colleagues from the other funds; close acquaintances and portfolio startups are also popular options picked by 18% of the respondents. But what about other sources? Workplace, schools, cold emails? Well, a small teaser is “it all works”.  But let’s check how. Fraternities and sororities  There is a pretty popular opinion that sharing the same college or school can seriously influence your future because of networking and close relationships while being young. According to the provided survey, sharing […]

research about venture capital (“VC”) syndication, so it is time to go deeper and understand key features in syndicated co-investment. This type of investment is a quite common process for VC deals; however, their structure is quite diverse: it depends on investor type, startup specialization, geography, stage of development, and many other factors. To make a deal, both the startup and the fund must understand what side encouraged joining the syndicate, what part will be covered by the lead investor, and the reasons forcing the funds to join the syndicate. The UN research team asked those questions to 210 foundations worldwide and found a lot of outstanding insights that describe in depth the behavior of investors in the syndicate, its context of geography, industries and investment stages. Would you like to know more? A closer look at respondents  Among the 210 funds the Unicorn Nest decided to ask, 56% comes […]

What do company owners think about syndication in venture? This phenomenon looks complicated, but financial scientists started to research it a long time ago. In their attempts provided all over European and American universities, specialists try to discover and test hypotheses about the underlying reasons for the fund’s cooperation into syndicates. These attempts were successful, as they managed to identify top-3 reasons for syndicate forming: risk sharing, portfolio diversification, and the option to access larger deals. But there are still a lot of in-depth insights. For example, researchers got evidence that a lower level of experience and expertise fosters the need to syndicate an investment, so the VC-funds join syndicates for the syndicate partners’ selection and value-adding skills. Thus, Unicorn Nest decided to get more data by starting to analyze syndicates. This research aimed to increase understanding of the venture capital market based on a comprehensive and verified dataset of […]

The number of exits of portfolio startups is one of the core metrics of a venture fund. To generate revenue for their LPs and attract investors in the future, VCs try to come up with smart and viable investment strategies. It requires finding a balance between portfolio diversification and limited expertise of funds’ partners.

Startups often underestimate their chances to find cross-border investments and receive funding for the required purposes. UN decided to learn more about the reasons and consequences of such decisions and interviewed 230 funds around the globe to find out how cross-border deals work for them, what spheres of interest attract VC-funds, where they prefer to invest, on what stages, and much more information. This research aimed to be useful both for startups and for investors to see key directions for cross-border deals and might help to review the investment strategy. Cross-border is a new black  According to the research, only 6% of funds are going to reduce the number of cross-border transactions, while 36% are going to increase it. This means COVID-19 crisis might have a short-term impact on investment plans now, but ⅓ of funds will increase their investments in the nearest future.  Funds from Latin America, Western Europe […]

Venture industry itself is risky, full of surprises and requires attention. Information is a new air, but it can be used in different ways, and sometimes might be harmful for the market. COVID-19 is a perfect example that happened only half a year ago: internet and media were overdosed with materials predicting the future of all VC industry and startups market. Eventually, all this data could influence a company with premature decisions and intensify the crisis.   That’s why it is crucially important to define and understand the media landscape. For this purpose, one of the methods of automatized linguistics is being used. It is called sentiment-analysis and together with the UN we will discover how big is its power.  Meet the basis Sentiment-analysis already entered your life, starting from Barack Obama election campaign back in 2008. There are definitely a lot of examples even before, but Obama’s social media campaign […]

The number of cross-border venture capital investments has increased by 5 times since 2000, and it continues to grow. At Unicorn Nest, we decided to examine the trends in cross-border investments in the latest period, since 2014, and here are some of the key takeaways. But firstly, let’s clarify what we are writing about. Cross-border investing refers to a financing arrangement that occurs outside a country’s borders and could help to find resources beyond domestic borders. Cross-border venture capital investments play an important role in scaling up high-growth companies. Policymakers express concerns that foreign VC investments transfer the majority of economic activity to the investor country. The startups however welcome foreign capital, expertise, and networks that usually go along with cross-border investments. Startups are often wary of international investments, especially from VC-funds located far from a startup’s incorporation country. This article also explains geographical connections between VC funds origins and […]

Great lockdown recession is often compared with 2009 crisis and predicted to be the worst economic downturn since The Great Depression. According to IMF report in June, global growth will fall by 4,9 percent; global economic recovery is expected to be 5,4 percent in 2021, but this forecast might work only if pandemic fades in the second half of 2020. All three IMF scenarios infer negative dynamics for 2020 and uncertain growth in 2021, depending on COVID-19 possible outbreaks.   Venture capital investments is being on a list of sensitive spheres instantly responding on every economic turmoil. However, the research, provided by EXPERTORAMA in partnership with Unicorn Nest, displays that investment funds are more optimistic about the end of crisis, comparing to IMF data. Losses and reduction Based on research provided with surveying 250 funds mostly in North America, Europe and Asia, almost 19% of representatives decreased number of deals. […]

In light of recent events, many startup owners are thinking about how to survive in times of crisis and how to raise money. We recommend listening to Denis Dovgopoliy, who during his career managed to be both on the side of startups and the side of investors. Also, he witnessed the global financial crisis of 2008-09 in Silicon Valley How it was in previous crises Of course, the current crisis is very different from the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, and from the Great Recession of 1999–2000, but it is worth paying attention to many significant trends. In particular, the fact that those investors and entrepreneurs who successfully survived the 1999–2000 recession, when the entire industry collapsed, worked much more efficiently. As soon as the crisis came in 2008, the sub-primes collapsed and the market experienced a shock, startups who raised money shortly before the crisis were in absolute gain. […]

Nowadays there is almost no startup left that would work in one narrow field. All the successful cases appear at the intersection of different industries. Therefore, the task of each fund is to determine in its strategic direction the set of industries that will not only be required separately in the future, but also within the interaction between its elements that will cause a synergistic effect for the entire portfolio. At the same time, the apparatus for making key decisions of the fund consists of employees (partners), each of whom has a unique set of skills and past experience that gives this employee expertise in a particular area. In this article, we analyzed how widespread are the differences between the fund’s strategy for selecting industries for its portfolio compared with the industries that its key employees are interested in. To accomplish this task we compared the top 10 most popular […]