Venture Capital Investments (market Statistics)

In the OECD Entrepreneurship Financing Database, venture capital is made up of the sum of early stage (including pre-seed, seed, start-up and other early stage) and later stage venture capital. As there are no harmonised definitions of venture capital stages across venture capital associations and other data providers, original data have been re-aggregated to fit the OECD classification of venture capital by stages. Korea, New Zealand, the Russian Federation and South Africa do not provide breakdowns of venture capital by stage that would allow meaningful international comparisons.

The attached table shows the correspondences between original data and OECD harmonised data for venture capital investments by stage.

https://stats.oecd.org/wbos/fileview2.aspx?IDFile=2aa27890-769e-4f10-843a-a654c5e7b24e

Venture capital is a form of equity financing particularly relevant for young companies with innovation and growth potential but untested business models and no track record; it replaces or complements traditional bank finance. The development of the venture capital industry is considered an important framework condition to stimulate innovative entrepreneurship. Aggregate data on venture capital provide useful information on trends in the venture capital industry.

These data are typically compiled by national or regional Private Equity and Venture Capital Associations, often with the support of commercial data providers. The quality and availability of aggregate data on venture capital have improved considerably in recent years; international comparisons, however, remain complicated because of two main problems.

The first difficulty comes from the lack of a standard international definition of venture capital. While there is a general understanding, the definition of the types of investments included in venture capital varies across countries and regions. In some cases, differences are purely linguistic; in others, they are more substantive. The second problem relates to the diverse methodologies employed by data compilers. The completeness and representativeness of venture capital statistics with respect to the venture capital industry of a country will differ depending on how data were collected.

The units used are : Millions of US Dollars and share of GDP.

OECD statistics contact: stat.contact@oecd.org