IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oec/stiaaa/2025-13-en.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Venture capital, innovation and business success in cleantech startups: The new green economy

Author

Listed:
  • Antoine Dechezleprêtre
  • Petra Kelly

Abstract

Startups play a pivotal role in driving innovation and can significantly contribute to the transition toward an environmentally sustainable economy. This paper presents new evidence on the creation, performance, and innovation activity of green startups—those offering goods and services relevant to the green transition—over the period 2010–2022. While the share of green startups has grown modestly overall, venture capital investment in green startups increased considerably in recent years, peaking at around EUR 74 billion globally in 2021. The econometric analysis shows that green startups are more likely to secure VC, receive grants, and innovate than non-green startups. They nonetheless take longer to secure VC and are less likely to do so at the seed stage. Grants attract private investment, especially for green firms, and clean tech patenting is associated with improved funding outcomes. Green startups are less likely to go public and tend to take longer to exit, suggesting scale-up challenges that may warrant targeted policy support.

Suggested Citation

  • Antoine Dechezleprêtre & Petra Kelly, 2025. "Venture capital, innovation and business success in cleantech startups: The new green economy," OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers 2025/13, OECD Publishing.
    • Handle: RePEc:oec:stiaaa:2025/13-en
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Clean Technologies; Climate Innovation; Green Startups; Green Transition; Innovation Ecosystems; Sustainable Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G24 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Investment Banking; Venture Capital; Brokerage
    • L26 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Entrepreneurship
    • O31 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives
    • Q55 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Technological Innovation
    • O38 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Government Policy

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oec:stiaaa:2025/13-en. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/scoecfr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.