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Sofia Avdeitchikova

Sofia defended her PhD thesis in 2008 on the topic of informal venture capital/business angels. Her main research interests are the geography of venture finance, investment decision-making and evaluation of public initiatives towards increasing the supply of venture finance. Sofia has published several academic papers on this topic, including “On the structure of the informal venture capital market in Sweden: developing investment roles” (2008) in Venture Capital: An International Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance, “False expectations: reconsidering the role of informal venture capital in closing the regional equity gap” (2009) in Entrepreneurship and Regional Development and “The geographic organization of ‘venture capital’ and ‘business angels’” (forthcoming) in Handbook of Research on Venture Capital.

Sofia is a Certified Policy Evaluator and was previously employed as a Senior Policy Consultant at Ramboll Management Consulting where she was in charge of entrepreneurship and venture finance policy evaluation studies on behalf of governmental agencies and ministries in Sweden, as well as international governmental organizations. Since Fall 2009 Sofia is responsible for leading the on-going evaluation of the Swedish governmental venture capital initiative – a project co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund that consists of 12 regional funds and has a budget around 2.5 billion SEK (ca $400 million). In this position, Sofia is constantly involved in the dialogue about the set-up, functioning and the effectiveness of such funds in different regional and national contexts and participates in expert meetings arranged by European Commission, the European Trade Association for Business Angels, Seed Funds, and other Early Stage Market Player (EBAN) and other related organizations.