Venture Capital Continuity

Venture Capital Continuity and Hard Commercialisation in European Physical Technology

Does venture capital move physical-technology ventures towards commercialisation, or primarily towards more capital?

Maria Ksenia Witte, Arise Innovations®, 27 August 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22127841

European innovation policy often treats follow-on financing as evidence of venture progress. Investors raise another round. Programmes report capital attracted. Ecosystems interpret continued funding as validation.

But a financing event is not the same outcome as production, regulatory clearance, repeated deployment, procurement or durable market use.

This empirical paper examines that distinction within a dated cohort of 48 European physical-technology ventures selected from the 2021 EIC Accelerator cohorts. It separates four elements that are frequently collapsed into one success narrative:

• institutional venture capital already present before the observation anchor;
• subsequent capital continuity;
• commercial maturity at the starting point; and
• attainment of a strict, study-specific hard-commercialisation benchmark.

The analysis asks not simply whether prior VC is associated with later progress, but which observable outcome layer moved, for which starting state and over which commercialisation clock.

What the paper contains

The full analytical paper includes:

• complete cohort construction, inclusion and exclusion rules, and sector composition;
• formal definitions of pre-anchor VC, follow-on financing and hard commercialisation;
• full contingency tables, effect estimates, confidence intervals and statistical tests;
• separate analysis of ventures that were still pre-commercial at the observation anchor;
• treatment of ventures already commercial when the observation period began;
• sector-level patterns across different physical-technology pathways;
• confidence-restricted sensitivity analyses;
• examination of public-source non-events and measurement uncertainty;
• the case-level coding register and primary source register;
• detailed implications for investors, public funders, accelerators, scale-up organisations and innovation policymakers.

Why this matters

The findings expose a measurement problem with practical consequences.

Capital continuity may be visible even where the decisive technical, industrial, regulatory or buyer-side transition remains unresolved. At the same time, ventures that were already commercially advanced can make the relationship between finance and commercialisation appear stronger than it is among ventures still facing the transition.

This matters wherever capital raised is used as a proxy for commercial progress, programme impact or venture quality.

The paper provides an empirical basis for separating:

capital-market continuity from commercial transition, selection from intervention effect, and elapsed time from pathway-appropriate progress.

Who this paper is for

This paper is particularly relevant to:

• venture capital and deep-tech investors;
• innovation policymakers and public funders;
• EIC, national and regional programme stakeholders;
• accelerator, incubator and scale-up programme leaders;
• technology transfer and commercialisation professionals;
• corporate innovation and industrial adoption teams;
• researchers studying innovation finance and venture development;
• founders of physical, regulated and industrial technology ventures.

Scope and interpretation

The study is exploratory and observational. It does not estimate a causal effect of venture capital or the EIC Accelerator. The cohort is a selected institutional population, not a representative sample of the entire European VC or deep tech market.

Product format

Digital full analytical paper in PDF format.

A citable public research summary is archived separately through Zenodo. The Zenodo version establishes the public research contribution and DOI record but does not contain the detailed statistical results, full operational definitions, sensitivity analyses, sector findings or case-level audit materials included in this product.

This purchase is intended for individual professional use. For institutional circulation, programme-wide access or licensing enquiries, please contact Arise Innovations.