Il finanziamento Venture Capital: implicazioni della definizione di Piccola e Media Impresa

This work analyzes the current definition of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) provided by the European Commission comparing it with similar definitions adopted by other international organizations and synthetizing potential strengths and weaknesses. This analysis investigates how Venture Capitalists’ (VC) participation in the equity or the voting rights of a company can influence its status of SME and implicitly introduce a constraint in the access to public funding.Our descriptive analysis shows that only a limited share of VC-backed companies would not have had access to public funding applying the standard thresholds that are currently required by the European Commission SME definition.