Towards successful entrepreneurial fundraising through equity crowdfundingthe role of anchor investors

Resumen

Crowdfunding has increasingly gained momentum as a type offundraising by entrepreneurs that offers numerous advantages overtraditional funding sources, mainly in terms of agility and gaining feedback from the innovative ecosystem. However, while obtaining funds from the crowd allows any entrepreneur the opportunity to access a large number of potential funders or investors, geographically and socioeconomically diverse, there are still many projects that fail to raise funds. In fact, the digital environment in which crowdfunding takes place is characterized by large information asymmetries between entrepreneurs, as the best informed party, and potential investors or funders, who only count on the information provided by the former. In order to mitigate these asymmetriesand create an environment of trust that makes fundraising possible, this study performs a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) with data sourced from syndicated equity crowdfunding, studying how anchor investor information disclosure influences campaign success. In this sense, the resulting causal configurations identify the most optimal information disclosure practices. This contributes to the literature on crowdfunding success drivers as well as provides practical implications for effective entrepreneurial fundraising