Unveiling Latent Structure of Venture Capital Syndication Networks

Abstract

Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by VC institutions to startups with high growth potential due to innovative technology or novel business models but also high risks. To against uncertainties and benefit from mutual complementarity and sharing resources and information, making joint-investments with other VC institutions on the same startup are pervasive, which forms an ever-growing complex syndication network. Attaining objective classifications of VC institutions and revealing the latent structure of joint-investment behaviors between them can deepen our understanding of the VC industry and boost the healthy development of the market and economy. In this work, we devise an iterative Loubar method based on the Lorenz curve to make objective classification of VC institutions automatically, which does not require setting arbitrary thresholds and the number of categories. We further reveal distinct investment behaviors across categories, where the top-ranked group enters more industries and investment stages with a better performance. Through network embedding of joint investment relations, we unveil the existence of possible territories of top-ranked VC institutions, and the hidden structure of relations between VC institutions.