This is a research project at the University of Kentucky tracking the companies and investors that participated in the Kentucky Angel Investment Tax Credit (KAITC) program from 2015 through 2018.
Between 2015 and 2018, 287 angel investors put $30,588,003 into 73 Kentucky startups through the KAITC program. What happened next? That's what we're trying to find out.
For each of the 73 companies in the KAITC cohort, we're documenting:
Are they still operating? Many Kentucky startups have grown into thriving businesses. Others were acquired, pivoted, or closed. We're tracking the current status of every company in the program.
Did they raise more capital? The KAITC investment was often a company's first institutional funding. We're documenting follow-on funding rounds, VC investment, and other capital events.
Did they stay in Kentucky? One goal of the program was to build Kentucky's entrepreneurial ecosystem. We're tracking whether companies maintained operations in the state.
What did they build? Patents filed, federal grants won, products launched, jobs created — these are the tangible outputs that justify the program's tax expenditure.
Here's where things stand:
Over 20 states spend public money on angel investor tax credits, but almost none track what happens to the companies afterward. Kentucky published unusually detailed program data — including individual investor names — which makes it possible to study this program at a depth that isn't available anywhere else in the country.
The findings from this research can help answer practical questions: Is the tax credit a good use of public funds? What kinds of companies benefit most? Does the program attract experienced investors who can help companies succeed? These are questions that matter for Kentucky's economic development strategy and for the dozens of other states running similar programs.
If you're a founder or employee of a KAITC company: You know things about your company that public records don't capture — whether the business is still operating, how many people it employs, whether it raised additional funding, and what happened after the KAITC investment. Even a quick confirmation of basic facts is enormously valuable. Everything you share is used strictly for academic research.
If you're an investor who participated in the KAITC program: Your perspective on the investment process, the companies you backed, and how those investments performed is central to this research. I'm especially interested in speaking with investors who backed multiple companies through the program. Your identity can be kept confidential in any published findings.
If you work in Kentucky's entrepreneurial ecosystem: Accelerator operators, attorneys, economic development professionals, and others who were involved with KAITC companies may have context that helps fill in the gaps. If you know what happened to a company on our directory, we'd like to hear from you.
This is academic research conducted at the University of Kentucky. The data collected through this site is used solely for dissertation research and related academic publications.
Individual investor names are not displayed on the public site. Investor-level analysis in published research will use anonymized identifiers unless you provide explicit consent to be named.
Company-level data (status, funding, etc.) is aggregated from public sources and may be displayed on this site. If you provide company information through the contribution form, it will be attributed to "community contribution" rather than to you personally, unless you prefer otherwise.
Investment records — published by the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development. This is the primary government source for who invested in which company, how much, and when.
Company status — compiled from Kentucky Secretary of State filings, SEC EDGAR, SBIR.gov, USPTO, LinkedIn, company websites, press coverage, and community contributions.
Network analysis — computed from the investment records. When two investors both invested in the same company, they're connected in the network.
Every company page on this site shows where each piece of data came from and whether it's been verified by a human source. Fields marked "◇ research" are compiled from public records and may contain errors — which is one reason your contributions are so valuable.
If you use data from this project in your own research, please cite it as:
This dataset is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. You are free to share and adapt the data for any purpose, including commercial use, provided you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
A formal data description paper and persistent DOI are forthcoming. In the interim, please use the citation above. If you are using this data in a publication and would like to coordinate, I welcome the opportunity to discuss — reach out via the contact information below.
This research is conducted as part of a doctoral dissertation in the Department of Finance at the University of Kentucky. If you'd like to discuss the project, correct an error, or share information about a company in the dataset, I'd be glad to hear from you.
The fastest way to share company information is through the contribution form. For broader questions about the research, please reach out directly at shane.hadden@uky.edu.