Global professional services firm, PwC, has published an SME Equity Financing Atlas in order to provide a comprehensive picture of the state of investments worldwide.
“The SME Equity Financing Atlas provides a clear view on the equity financing ecosystem and on current market trends. It offers guidance to governments and policy makers on reviewing existing, and introducing new financing policies by identifying gaps in the ecosystem,” explained Laurent Probst, partner at PwC Luxembourg and PwC's Accelerator network global leader.
The publication comes from PwC’s Accelerator, and was created in response to the growth in equity investments driven by growing accumulation of capital in investor’s hands, new technologies and low interest rates.
“We analysed all venture capital and growth equity investments in SME’s from 2010-2015 based on Pitchbook and World Bank data. The Atlas is a useful reference guide for CEOs of SMEs looking for financing. It helps them to understand the global equity financing market and to identify barriers and enablers at a global, cross-border and regional level,” said Cyrille Foillard, managing director at PwC’s Accelerator.
The PwC Accelerator team considered investments in SMEs covering more than 52,000 SMEs, 81,000 deals and 33,000 equity investors. In the course of their research, they picked up on a number of trends, including a boom in equity investments in SMEs, accelerators and incubators are on the rise and investing in young companies, as shown by a growth of 578% in the number of deals over five years, and more and more corporates are creating their own venture capital funds to source and invest in young innovative SMEs with more than €20 billion invested in 2015.
In all of this dealing they said, Europe is picking up a little, with 21% of deals being done with European ventures, but they are still fare behind the US.
The “SME Equity Financing Atlas” is available on the website: PwC’s Accelerator.
