"The role of equity funding in driving scaleup growth. Evidence from a longitudinal study on the italian tech scaleup scenario" by Serena Valente

Topic

The concept of scaleups is relatively new (Coviello et al., 2024) but has been a key topic for practitioners and policymakers for over a decade (SEP, 2015; Autio, 2016; EC, 2016). Scholars are “playing catch up” (Coad et al., 2024), with academic interest in scaleups growing recently due to their importance for job creation, wealth, productivity, and social impact (Bohan et al., 2024). Early research, including over 50 key studies (Coviello et al., 2024), focused on defining scaling and scaleups, debating whether scaling is a strategy or process, and how to identify scaleups (Coad et al., 2024). More recent work examines how firms sustain high growth (Jansen et al., 2023), but there is limited understanding of the specific actions and capabilities that enable scaling (Piaskowska et al., 2021). This study addresses this gap by exploring the role of equity funding in supporting the growth of Italian tech scaleups, using a unique longitudinal dataset from 2013 to 2024.