The number, importance, and popularity of rankings measuring innovation performance and the strength and resources of ecosystems that provide its spatial framework are on an increasing trend globally. In addition to influencing the specific decisions taken by economic actors, these rankings significantly impact the development of innovation-related policies at regional, national, and international levels. The importance of startup ecosystems is proven by the growing scientific interest, which is demonstrated by the increasing number of related scientific articles. The concept of the startup ecosystem is a relatively new category, the application of which in everyday and scientific life has been gaining ground since the end of the 2000s. In parallel, of course, the demand for measurability and comparability has emerged among decision-makers and scholars. This demand is met by startup ecosystem rankings, which now measure and rank the performance of individual ecosystems on a continental and global scale. However, while the number of scientific publications examining rankings related to higher education, economic performance, or even innovation, can be measured in the order of thousands, scientific research has so far rarely or tangentially addressed the rankings of startup ecosystems. This study and the related research intend to fill this gap by presenting and analysing the characteristics of global rankings and identifying possible future research directions.

LLM based agents have recently demonstrated strong potential in automating complex tasks, yet accurately predicting startup success remains an open challenge with few benchmarks and tailored frameworks. To address these limitations, we propose the Startup Success Forecasting Framework, an autonomous system that emulates the reasoning of venture capital analysts through a multi agent collaboration model. Our framework integrates traditional machine learning methods such as random forests and neural networks within a retrieval augmented generation framework composed of three interconnected modules: a prediction block, an analysis block, and an external knowledge block. We evaluate our framework and identify three main findings. First, by leveraging founder segmentation, startups led by L5 founders are 3.79 times more likely to succeed than those led by L1 founders. Second, baseline large language models consistently overpredict startup success and struggle under realistic class imbalances largely due to overreliance on founder claims. Third, our framework significantly enhances prediction accuracy, yielding a 108.3 percent relative improvement over GPT 4o mini and a 30.8 percent relative improvement over GPT 4o. These results demonstrate the value of a multi agent approach combined with discriminative machine learning in mitigating the limitations of standard large language model based prediction methods.

Context: Software startups are an essential source of innovation and software-intensive products. The need to understand product development in startups and to provide relevant support are highlighted in software research. While state-of-the-art literature reveals how startups develop their software, the reasons why they adopt these activities are underexplored. Objective: This study investigates the tactics behind software engineering (SE) activities by analyzing key engineering events during startup journeys. We explore how entrepreneurial mindsets may be associated with SE knowledge areas and with each startup case. Method: Our theoretical foundation is based on causation and effectuation models. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 40 software startups. We used two-round open coding and thematic analysis to describe and identify entrepreneurial software development patterns. Additionally, we calculated an effectuation index for each startup case. Results: We identified 621 events merged into 32 codes of entrepreneurial logic in SE from the sample. We found a systemic occurrence of the logic in all areas of SE activities. Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Technical Debt (TD), and Customer Involvement (CI) tend to be associated with effectual logic, while testing activities at different levels are associated with causal logic. The effectuation index revealed that startups are either effectuation-driven or mixed-logics-driven. Conclusions: Software startups fall into two types that differentiate between how traditional SE approaches may apply to them. Effectuation seems the most relevant and essential model for explaining and developing suitable SE practices for software startups.

Software startups face with multiple technical and business challenges, which could make the startup journey longer, or even become a failure. Little is known about entrepreneurial decision making as a direct force to startup development outcome. In this study, we attempted to apply a behaviour theory of entrepreneurial firms to understand the root-cause of some software startup s challenges. Six common challenges related to prototyping and product development in twenty software startups were identified. We found the behaviour theory as a useful theoretical lens to explain the technical challenges. Software startups search for local optimal solutions, emphasise on short-run feedback rather than long-run strategies, which results in vague prototype planning, paradox of demonstration and evolving throw-away prototypes. The finding implies that effectual entrepreneurial processes might require a more suitable product development approach than the current state-of-practice.

Context: Software startups are newly created companies with no operating history and fast in producing cutting-edge technologies. These companies develop software under highly uncertain conditions, tackling fast-growing markets under severe lack of resources. Therefore, software startups present an unique combination of characteristics which pose several challenges to software development activities. Objective: This study aims to structure and analyze the literature on software development in startup companies, determining thereby the potential for technology transfer and identifying software development work practices reported by practitioners and researchers. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping study, developing a classification schema, ranking the selected primary studies according their rigor and relevance, and analyzing reported software development work practices in startups. Results: A total of 43 primary studies were identified and mapped, synthesizing the available evidence on software development in startups. Only 16 studies are entirely dedicated to software development in startups, of which 10 result in a weak contribution (advice and implications (6); lesson learned (3); tool (1)). Nineteen studies focus on managerial and organizational factors. Moreover, only 9 studies exhibit high scientific rigor and relevance. From the reviewed primary studies, 213 software engineering work practices were extracted, categorized and analyzed. Conclusion: This mapping study provides the first systematic exploration of the state-of-art on software startup research. The existing body of knowledge is limited to a few high quality studies. Furthermore, the results indicate that software engineering work practices are chosen opportunistically, adapted and configured to provide value under the constrains imposed by the startup context.

Software startups have emerged as an interesting multiperspective research area. Inspired by Lean Startup, a startup journey can be viewed as a series of experiments that validate a set of business hypotheses an entrepreneurial team make explicitly or inexplicitly about their startup. It is little known about how startups evolve through business hypothesis testing. This study proposes a novel approach to look at the startup evolution as a Minimum Viable Product(MVP) creat- ing process. We identified relationships among business hypotheses and MVPs via ethnography and post-mortem analysis in two software star- tups. We observe that the relationship between hypotheses and MVPs is incomplete and non-linear in these two startups. We also find that entrepreneurs do learn from testing their hypotheses. However, there are hypotheses not tested by MVPs and vice versa, MVPs not related to any business hypothesis. The approach we proposed visualizes the flow of entrepreneurial knowledge across pivots via MVPs.

In this report, we summarize the integrated multilingual audio processing pipeline developed by our team for the inaugural NCIIPC Startup India AI GRAND CHALLENGE, addressing Problem Statement 06: Language-Agnostic Speaker Identification and Diarisation, and subsequent Transcription and Translation System. Our primary focus was on advancing speaker diarization, a critical component for multilingual and code-mixed scenarios. The main intent of this work was to study the real-world applicability of our in-house speaker diarization (SD) systems. To this end, we investigated a robust voice activity detection (VAD) technique and fine-tuned speaker embedding models for improved speaker identification in low-resource settings. We leveraged our own recently proposed multi-kernel consensus spectral clustering framework, which substantially improved the diarization performance across all recordings in the training corpus provided by the organizers. Complementary modules for speaker and language identification, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and neural machine translation were integrated in the pipeline. Post-processing refinements further improved system robustness.

Startups have become in less than 50 years a major component of innovation and economic growth. An important feature of the startup phenomenon has been the wealth created through equity in startups to all stakeholders. These include the startup founders, the investors, and also the employees through the stock-option mechanism and universities through licenses of intellectual property. In the employee group, the allocation to important managers like the chief executive, vice-presidents and other officers, and independent board members is also analyzed. This report analyzes how equity was allocated in more than 400 startups, most of which had filed for an initial public offering. The author has the ambition of informing a general audience about best practice in equity split, in particular in Silicon Valley, the central place for startup innovation.

Software startups continue to be important drivers of economy globally. As the initial investment required to found a new software company becomes smaller and smaller resulting from technological advances such as cloud technology, increasing numbers of new software startups are born. Typically, the main argument for studying software startups is that they differ from mature software organizations in various ways, thus making the findings of many existing studies not directly applicable to them. How, exactly, software startups really differ from other types of software organizations as an on-going debate. In this paper, we seek to better understand how software startups differ from mature software organizations in terms of development practices. Past studies have primarily studied method use, and in comparison, we take on a more atomic approach by focusing on practices. Utilizing the Essence Theory of Software Engineering as a framework, we split these practices into categories for analysis while simultaneously evaluating the suitability of the theory for the context of software startups. Based on the results, we propose changes to the Essence Theory of Software Engineering for it to better fit the startup context.

To grow their businesses, entrepreneurs often rely on equity funding. This paper focuses on two elements of entrepreneur-investor equity negotiations: the number of potential investors and the contractual complexity surrounding investor protection. Our approach involves a theoretical model and a series of laboratory experiments that analyze the effects of different bargaining conditions and contractual terms on the equity (ownership) split between entrepreneurs and their investors. We show that the conventional wisdom that entrepreneurs should seek to negotiate with as many investors as possible, while consistent with the theoretical model, is not true in the data. Indeed, negotiating with multiple investors reduces the entrepreneur's profits under most conditions. We also show that investor downside protections may disadvantage early-stage startups, but can be beneficial to later-stage startups. A refinement of belief modeling in multi-party bargaining, as well as a stylized risk allocation framework, reconcile these results with theory predictions. Our findings provide a decision framework for entrepreneurs to optimize their approach to investors and negotiate favorable contractual terms.