How are company-years in the Performance of deep tech startups dashboard defined?

Company-years is a unit of measurement that counts the total number of active companies for each year in the observation period. A company is considered active in a given year if it was founded in or before that year. For example, if 10 companies are active in 2021 and 20 companies are active in 2022, this gives 30 company-years in total; even if the same companies are active in both years. This measure is used as the denominator for rate-based indicators, namely the deal frequency, the job creation rate and the exit rate. This ensures that each rate reflects activity relative to the size of the active startup population in each year, rather than the total number of companies overall.