Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Maréchal, Loïc, Mermoud, Alain, David, Dimitri Percia, Humbert, Mathias
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04765
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866909114396835840
author Maréchal, Loïc
Mermoud, Alain
David, Dimitri Percia
Humbert, Mathias
author_facet Maréchal, Loïc
Mermoud, Alain
David, Dimitri Percia
Humbert, Mathias
contents Early-stage firms play a significant role in driving innovation and creating new products and services, especially for cybersecurity. Therefore, evaluating their performance is crucial for investors and policymakers. This work presents a financial evaluation of early-stage firms' performance in 19 cybersecurity sectors using a private-equity dataset from 2010 to 2022 retrieved from Crunchbase. We observe firms, their primary and secondary activities, funding rounds, and pre and post-money valuations. We compare cybersecurity sectors regarding the amount raised over funding rounds and post-money valuations while inferring missing observations. We observe significant investor interest variations across categories, periods, and locations. In particular, we find the average capital raised (valuations) to range from USD 7.24 mln (USD 32.39 mln) for spam filtering to USD 45.46 mln (USD 447.22 mln) for the private cloud sector. Next, we assume a log process for returns computed from post-money valuations and estimate the expected returns, systematic and specific risks, and risk-adjusted returns of investments in early-stage firms belonging to cybersecurity sectors. Again, we observe substantial performance variations with annualized expected returns ranging from 9.72\% for privacy to 177.27\% for the blockchain sector. Finally, we show that overall, the cybersecurity industry performance is on par with previous results found in private equity. Our results shed light on the performance of cybersecurity investments and, thus, on investors' expectations about cybersecurity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_04765
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Measuring the performance of investments in information security startups: An empirical analysis by cybersecurity sectors using Crunchbase data
Maréchal, Loïc
Mermoud, Alain
David, Dimitri Percia
Humbert, Mathias
Pricing of Securities
Early-stage firms play a significant role in driving innovation and creating new products and services, especially for cybersecurity. Therefore, evaluating their performance is crucial for investors and policymakers. This work presents a financial evaluation of early-stage firms' performance in 19 cybersecurity sectors using a private-equity dataset from 2010 to 2022 retrieved from Crunchbase. We observe firms, their primary and secondary activities, funding rounds, and pre and post-money valuations. We compare cybersecurity sectors regarding the amount raised over funding rounds and post-money valuations while inferring missing observations. We observe significant investor interest variations across categories, periods, and locations. In particular, we find the average capital raised (valuations) to range from USD 7.24 mln (USD 32.39 mln) for spam filtering to USD 45.46 mln (USD 447.22 mln) for the private cloud sector. Next, we assume a log process for returns computed from post-money valuations and estimate the expected returns, systematic and specific risks, and risk-adjusted returns of investments in early-stage firms belonging to cybersecurity sectors. Again, we observe substantial performance variations with annualized expected returns ranging from 9.72\% for privacy to 177.27\% for the blockchain sector. Finally, we show that overall, the cybersecurity industry performance is on par with previous results found in private equity. Our results shed light on the performance of cybersecurity investments and, thus, on investors' expectations about cybersecurity.
title Measuring the performance of investments in information security startups: An empirical analysis by cybersecurity sectors using Crunchbase data
topic Pricing of Securities
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04765