Crowdfunding is an emerging platform for raising capital. It is a good way for entrepreneurs, organizations, NGOs, startups and others to raise resources. This paper focuses on crowdfunding as a source of finance. The study is based on a survey and aims to explore the general awareness about crowdfunding and the challenges of using it as a source of finance in India. A questionnaire-consisting of 17 questions focusing on demographic profile of the respondents, awareness about crowdfunding, challenges, and popular projects for investment in crowdfunding-was administered to 75 respondents. Descriptive statistics, One-Sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test and Kruskal-Wallis H Test are applied in the study for data analysis. The results reveal that people are aware about crowdfunding, and that there is a significant difference in the opinions of the respondents on the basis of their educational qualifications. The major challenges faced are lack of information on crowdfunding and risk of failure and losing money.

Although there has been a significant rise in high-valued unicorns from emerging economies, especially China and India, unicorns from advanced economies have witnessed maximum exits. Therefore, the study intends to explore whether there are any differences in pre-money valuation determinants of startups of emerging and advanced economies. In addition, the study also reflects the differences in valuation characteristics between unicorns/decacorns and early-stage/minicorn/soonicorn firms. The findings of multiple and binary logistic regressions suggest that pre-money valuation determinants like annual revenue, funding round, country, number of years after receiving the latest funding, latest funding amount and stake acquired are significant in predicting unicorns. In addition, startups from advanced economies get a higher valuation than their counterparts from emerging economies. Therefore, the study involves practical and theoretical implications for policymakers, founders, investors and researchers for enhancing the valuation of startups from emerging economies and enabling seed-stage startups to emerge as unicorns with successful exits.

This paper examines the impact of behavioral biases on fundamental analysis factors of investment decision of retail investors in Guwahati, Assam, India. The tested independent variables are anchoring, cognitive dissonance, confirmation and hindsight, Gambler's fallacy, herding, mental accounting, loss aversion bias, regret aversion bias, and overconfidence bias, and the dependent variable is fundamental analysis factors of investment decision making. Multinomial logistic regression is used to find out the impact of these biases on investment decision. The results reveal that herding bias and overconfidence bias impact investment decision. Overconfidence bias impacts investment decision of investors, which is based on company history, revenue growth, debt-to-equity ratio, and PE value.

This study aims to determine the factors influencing IT professionals' decision to continue using mobile fintech payment services (MFPS) and their propensity to recommend the technology. It focuses on the factors contributing to customer satisfaction, including post-adoption perceived trust, post-adoption perceived usefulness and post-adoption perceived interface quality and its influence on continuance intention. The study also investigates the influence of herd behavior on MFPS continuance intention and its effect on recommendation behavior. Using data from IT professionals in Kochi, Kerala, India, the study finds that post-adoption perceived trust, post-adoption perceived usefulness and post-adoption perceived interface quality significantly affect satisfaction, and that satisfaction significantly associates with intention to continue MFPS, and behavior to recommend. The results show that continuance intention leads to recommendation behavior, and also mediates the relation between satisfaction and recommendation behavior. The study rejects the hypothesis that herd behavior positively influences fintech continuance intention. The findings suggest that service providers must deliver services that satisfy customers, create trust in the technology, and improve its usefulness to encourage continued usage and recommendation. The study's findings are useful for fintech companies seeking to increase customer satisfaction and foster the adoption of their services.