You work for Spark Funds, an asset management company. Spark Funds wants to make investments in a few companies. The CEO of Spark Funds wants to understand the global trends in investments so that she can take the investment decisions effectively.
Spark Funds has two minor constraints for investments:
It wants to invest between 5 to 15 million USD per round of investment
It wants to invest only in English-speaking countries because of the ease of communication with the companies it would invest in
For your analysis, consider a country to be English speaking only if English is one of the official languages in that country
These conditions will give you sufficient information for your initial analysis. Before getting to specific questions, let’s understand the problem and the data first.
- What is the strategy?
Spark Funds wants to invest where most other investors are investing. This pattern is often observed among early stage startup investors.
- Where did we get the data from?
We have taken real investment data from crunchbase.com, so the insights you get may be incredibly useful. For this group project, we have divided the data into the following files: i) Company details: companies.txt - A table with basic data of companies
Description of Companies Table
Permalink ---> Unique ID of company
name ---> Company name
homepage_url ---> Website URL
category_list ---> Category/categories to which a company belongs
status ---> Operational status
country_code ---> Country Code
state_code ---> State
ii) Funding round details: rounds2.csv - funding round details
company_permalink ---> Unique ID of company
funding_round_permalink ---> Unique ID of funding round
funding_round_type -----> Type of funding – venture, angel, private equity etc.
funding_round_code -----> Round of venture funding (round A, B etc.)
funded_at -----> Date of funding
raised_amount_usd ---> Money raised in funding (USD)
iii) Sector Classification: mapping.csv: This file maps the numerous category names in the companies table (such 3D printing, aerospace, agriculture, etc.) to eight broad sector names. The purpose is to simplify the analysis into eight sector buckets, rather than trying to analyse hundreds of them.
- What is Spark Funds’ business objective?
The business objectives and goals of data analysis are pretty straightforward.
Business objective: The objective is to identify the best sectors, countries, and a suitable investment type for making investments. The overall strategy is to invest where others are investing, implying that the 'best' sectors and countries are the ones 'where most investors are investing'. Goals of data analysis: Your goals are divided into three sub-goals: Investment type analysis: Comparing the typical investment amounts in the venture, seed, angel, private equity etc. so that Spark Funds can choose the type that is best suited for their strategy. Country analysis: Identifying the countries which have been the most heavily invested in the past. These will be Spark Funds’ favourites as well. Sector analysis: Understanding the distribution of investments across the eight main sectors. (Note that we are interested in the eight 'main sectors' provided in the mapping file. The two files — companies and rounds2 — have numerous sub-sector names; hence, you will need to map each sub-sector to its main sector.)