Crowdfunding, Business Angels, and Venture Capital : New Funding Trajectories for Start-Ups?

The market for entrepreneurial equity finance has significantly evolved over the past decades and has grown ever more complex. Different investor-types, namely the crowd, business angels and venture capitalists contribute to the market, and their characteristics, investment behavior and contribution to venture governance and performance are the object of extensive research. Most of this research to date has a strong mono-investor-type focus. The present paper is a first attempt to gain deeper understanding of the complex funding trajectories made possible by various dynamic combinations of different investor types co-investing in the same venture in different configurations at different stages. An in-depth case study of a robotics venture which has successively received funding from reward-based crowdfunding, a combination of equity-crowdfunding (ECF) and various business angels (BAs), as well as a combination of ECF, BAs and multiple VCs is used to generate knowledge about the influence of such complex funding trajectories on the emergent governance of young growing ventures. It is shown that complex funding trajectories raise specific cognitive challenges for corporate governance and also raise the potential for specific agency conflicts