According to a study, people with a migration background play an important role in startups in Germany. About a fifth of company founders have foreign roots, according to a survey published on Thursday by the German Startup Association and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.
Within this group, 58 percent were not born in Germany. The majority came to the country either when they were young or to study. Only about eight percent came to the Federal Republic explicitly to set up a company.
Immigrant company founders have an above-average education. The rate of those with a university degree is 94.5 percent. In the case of startups in Germany, 87.2 percent of the founders are academics.
The study also found that the migrants had above-average ambition. Around 30 percent were aiming for a sale or an IPO of their company with a company valuation of more than one billion euros. That is more than twice as many as the overall average.
In order to achieve this goal, the immigrant company founders relied on external capital. 75 percent of those surveyed wanted to raise fresh money in the next twelve months, preferably from venture capitalists. With an average of around five million euros, the financial requirement is almost twice as high as in the German start-up scene as a whole.
Companies with founders with a migration background are also at the forefront when it comes to diversity. Just over half of the employees come from abroad. At 44 percent, the proportion of mixed-gender or purely female founding teams is also above average.
In addition to language barriers, immigrant company founders named bureaucratic hurdles as obstacles to business development. It is also difficult to establish business relationships with banks. Therefore, almost 57 percent from this group see themselves at a disadvantage compared to other founders. (Reuters)
