Features of venture capital funded enterprises: Evidence from Slovakia

Abstract

This article contains an exploratory study of micro, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) funded by venture capital in conditions of the Slovak Republic. Their features specifically the number of employees and the affiliation to the industry branch in compliance with technological or knowledge demandingness were investigated. For that purpose two scientific hypotheses were verified. Verification of hypotheses was performed by the exact tests on the research sample consisted of 61 venture capital funded SMEs in the Slovak Republic in the time period 2001-2006. According to affiliation of enterprises to the category of micro, small and medium sized enterprises in our research sample, our assumption that the micro and small sized enterprises are more venture capital driven than medium sized enterprises was confirmed. The results showed that the majority of venture capital funded SMEs are micro-enterprises representing 60.66% and small sized enterprises with a share of 27.87%. According to affiliation of enterprise to the industry branch in compliance with its technological or knowledge demandingness in our research sample, our assumption that venture capital is related especially to the enterprises in high-tech sector was not confirmed and we can conclude that venture capital is related more to the enterprises operating in low-tech or medium low-tech sector than to the enterprises operating in high-tech or medium high-tech sector. The share of enterprises in high-tech sector was the lowest (only 3.28%) among all the sectors (low-tech, medium low-tech, medium high-tech and high-tech).