Mobilizing Capital for Fostering the Early Growth of Firms: The Role of Business Angels in Nascent European Entrepreneurship

Despite the important role recognized to outside equity in financing and fostering innovative entrepreneurial firms (i.e., entrepreneurial start-ups), relatively little is known about the key characteristics of the different fund-providers involved either in a temporal perspective (diverse stage of the early firm’s life) or in an industry perspective (specialized equity investors). While business angels and venture capitalists are relatively common and welcome companions of entrepreneurs, various kinds of circumstances need to be accomplished and coordinated in order to establish and govern these relationships in a way that is really beneficial to all the parties. This chapter aims to discuss various aspects of the multifaceted relation between entrepreneurs seeking for finance to their early stage projects and business angels providing equity. In particular, we underscore the rationale for the emergence of the business angel networks in order to optimize search costs and the good match between supply and demand for funds. While business angel networks have found the way for their admittance in many European countries, in the USA, angel groups (or spontaneous investor associations) are far more developed. On the ground of a 5-year panel data extracted from the European Business Angel Network (EBAN), we explore in depth the intricacies and inefficiencies related to the action of the business angels networks in Europe and briefly juxtapose them to the Anglo-Saxon experience.