Investment Readiness in U.S. Sustainable FinTech Ventures: An Interpretive Analysis of Founder, Organizational, Ecosystem, and Investor Factors

Abstract

Investors evaluating sustainable FinTech startups must consider financial viability alongside sustainability readiness, governance quality, and technology-related risk. Existing due-diligence approaches provide limited guidance on how these factors interact in early-stage investment decisions. This study addresses that gap through a two-phase design combining interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and interpretive structural modeling (ISM). Semi-structured interviews with seventeen FinTech founders, sustainability-oriented investors and fund managers, and ecosystem actors produced sixteen constructs across macro-, founder-, organizational, investor-, and outcome-level dimensions. Eight participants subsequently evaluated the relationships among these constructs through ISM. The findings position regulatory alignment and national sustainability priorities as upstream influences. Founder orientation and leadership capability connect these external expectations to organizational practices, including data governance, sustainability reporting, technological scalability, and impact measurement. Investor evaluation practices and ecosystem validation then shape investment readiness, capital access, and due-diligence outcomes. The resulting framework explains how institutional conditions, founder characteristics, organizational capabilities, and investor judgments interact in the evaluation of sustainable FinTech ventures. It also provides investors, founders, policymakers, and ecosystem intermediaries with a structured basis for assessing investment readiness in the U.S. sustainable FinTech market.