Do venture capital backed companies show value added performance? : a study of growth in Norwegian venture capital backed companies compared to benchmarks of non venture capital backed comparable companies

The purpose of this thesis is to find out if companies that have received Venture Capital funding perform better than they are assumed to perform without. To test this, growth in sales, revenues, assets and employees in each of 71 VC backed Norwegian companies is compared to growth in a benchmark created for each of the VC backed companies. The benchmark is the average and the median of the comparable companies of each VC backed company, selected on the basis of the registered industry code, as well as age, level of revenues and number of employees in 2003. In addition, tests are conducted to check for possible explanations of differences in performance relative to benchmark based on characteristics of the VC backed companies. The key observation in the tests is that VC backed companies grew significantly more than benchmark in revenues and assets in the three year period from 2003 to 2006. Another unambiguous result is that companies where more than one VC has invested do better compared to benchmark than those where only one VC has invested