Finding 5 of 30 · Numerical finding
Only 49% of VC-backed startups show positive velocity growth
From A Longitudinal Panel of GitHub Engineering Velocity for Venture-Backed Startups (SSRN), section §4.2 Velocity change. CC BY 4.0.
TL;DR, Finding 5 of 30
49% of observations show positive velocity growth.
Section §4.2 Velocity change · CC BY 4.0 · from the SSRN paper (DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.6606558)
Commit velocityis a 14-day rolling count of commits to a startup’s most active public repository, the earliest public signal of engineering throughput before a fundraise announcement. All 30 findings in this series are derived from the SSRN panel dataset of ~350+ tracked startup GitHub organizations.
The finding
49% of observations show positive velocity growth.
Why it matters
Counterintuitive. Most assume 'all venture-backed startups grow fast.' Half do, half don't, even at this stage.
Provenance
- Paper: A Longitudinal Panel of GitHub Engineering Velocity for Venture-Backed Startups SSRN abstract 6606558.
- Section: §4.2 Velocity change
- Dataset DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19650920
- License: CC BY 4.0 - free for any use with attribution.
- Author: The Data Nerd (ORCID 0009-0002-2222-4112), VC Deal Flow Signal (GitDealFlow), Wikidata Q139376302.
- On this site, “engineering acceleration” refers to a quantitative GitHub momentum signal, unrelated to startup accelerator programs (Y Combinator, Techstars, 500 Global).
References
Peer-reviewed prior work this finding builds on. Each citation resolves to a DOI in a top-tier venue and appears in the page’s structured data as a ScholarlyArticle citation edge. Download all references as BibTeX.
- Eirini Kalliamvakou, Georgios Gousios, Kelly Blincoe, Leif Singer, Daniel M. German, Daniela Damian (2014). The Promises and Perils of Mining GitHub. Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR '14), MSR '14, pp. 92-101. DOI: 10.1145/2597073.2597074
- Bogdan Vasilescu, Yue Yu, Huaimin Wang, Premkumar Devanbu, Vladimir Filkov (2015). Quality and productivity outcomes relating to continuous integration in GitHub. Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE '15), ESEC/FSE '15, pp. 805-816. DOI: 10.1145/2786805.2786850
- Josh Lerner, Ramana Nanda (2020). Venture Capital's Role in Financing Innovation. Journal of Economic Perspectives, JEP 34(3): 237-261. DOI: 10.1257/jep.34.3.237
How to cite
The Data Nerd (2026). "Only 49% of VC-backed startups show positive velocity growth." Finding 5 of 30 in: A Longitudinal Panel of GitHub Engineering Velocity for Venture-Backed Startups. SSRN abstract=6606558. Retrieved from https://signals.gitdealflow.com/research/half-of-vc-startups-show-positive-velocity-growth
See all 30 findings
The full research summary, cited to section, with the SSRN preprint and the public CC BY 4.0 dataset.
View all findings →