Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

The Effect Founder’S Business And Technical Background On Access To External Equity Funding In Fintech Industry, Alexandria Iacoviello

Honors Projects in Business

This paper explores which founder backgrounds – business, technology, or both – are the most significant when achieving funding for a Financial Technology (Fintech) start-up. The research examines a sample of 289 Fintech start-ups from the cities of Bangalore, Beijing, Berlin, and Boston. The primary source of information was from a data set on the platform GrowthEnabler (GE). Our measure of success was the amount of external equity funding the companies received. The controlled variables for the founders were gender, immigrant status, education level, and prior start-up experience. The firm controls were business type and firm age. The independent variable …