Funding as a Trigger for Organizational Ambidexterity: How Early-Stage Capital Reconfigures Exploration and Exploitation in Tech Firms

Sammanfattning

Technology startups operate under distinctive funding conditions compared to other industries. Yet, little is known about how these funding events shape the balance between exploration and exploitation activities across organisational growth. While research on ambidexterity has examined mechanisms in mature firms, the influence of early-stage funding is largely ignored. Addressing this gap, this thesis examines how funding influences organisational ambidexterity through qualitative case studies spanning two-person startups to capital-heavy scale-ups. The findings show that funding does not increase exploration and exploitation directly, but it reconfigures the organisational conditions for which these activities occur. Four mechanisms occur: firstly, funding acts as a temporal inflection point, triggering the rapid reallocation of priorities. Secondly, capital expands capacity, enabling firms to shift from founder-driven to role-based, or structural, ambidexterity. Third, founder and investor expectations shape how funding is interpreted, leading to a paradox in which founders expect capital to increase exploration but then feel the need to prove the round through exploitation. Finally, boundary conditions such as governance constraints or capital intensity set limits on the extent to which funding can shift the balance.