The number of ventures with a market value of one billion USD or more has considerably increased during the last decade. Driven by new technologies and business models, these ventures became an integral part of our daily life. Particularly, the number of unicorns based in China and other regions outside the US raised during recent years whereas the phenomenon was initially limited to the US region. Existing research has mainly focused on descriptive approaches to examine the rise of these ventures but lacks knowledge on the drivers of this phenomenon. We address these research gaps and investigate the underlying factors that foster the emergence of such high-valued ventures. Our results present several economic environmental as well as investor-related factors that impact the likelihood for a venture to achieve a market valuation of more than one billion USD. Subsequently, we derive theoretical and practical implications that may foster the future emergence of new high-valued ventures, covering regulatory, investor-and venturespecific aspects.

Initial coin offerings have recently become one of the most important funding resources for ventures in the blockchain area. However, often ventures do not rely solely on initial coin offerings as funding source but receive also investments from more established investors prior or during their initial coin offering. In particular, blockchain related ventures have drawn the attention of (corporate) venture capitalists but only less is known on the interplay of these different funding sources and their influence on initial coin offerings as well as on ventures’ further development. Based on the signaling theory as well as the resource-based-view our empirical study find that venture capital investors as well as corporate venture capital investors have a significantly positive effect on initial coin offerings. Further, we find that the reputation, the time of treatment as well as the specialization of investors have a positive influence on the initial coin offering. Finally, our results indicate that the positive effect of venture capital investors as well as the specialization of an investor continues to influence blockchain based ventures’ success in the mid-term.

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