What has replaced Silicon Valley Bank as start-ups’ favourite banker?

The Silicon Valley Bank ski trip to Deer Valley was one of the biggest annual networking events for technology start-ups before the bank failed last March, the largest bank to collapse since the global financial crisis.

Without missing a year, the party on the Utah slopes will go ahead this month as First Citizens — the North Carolina bank that acquired SVB from bankruptcy — jostles with the likes of JPMorgan, HSBC and Stifel for a share of the “innovation economy”.

“A year later, it feels eerily similar to pre-SVB downfall,” said Peter Hébert, chief operating officer at $5bn Silicon Valley venture firm Lux Capital. “Whatever gaps would have existed in the near term have very quickly been filled.”

For three decades, SVB was the central financing institution for technology and life sciences start-ups in the US. As it collapsed, about $130bn of its deposits and teams of its bankers headed for the comparatively fortress-like balance sheets of larger rivals.

The landscape for day-to-day banking of the venture capital ecosystem is more competitive than before SVB failed. But the core of the bank’s role was its high-risk appetite for underwriting loans to pre-revenue or lossmaking start-ups based on the strength of their venture capital backers and the likelihood they would continue to invest.

Despite the flood of new options, fledgling technology companies are in some cases struggling to get the same access to capital that powered the booming venture market for two decades. None is as appealing as the “one-stop-shop” linchpin to the venture community SVB had been.

“Venture lending has really bifurcated into two different businesses — early-stage lending and late stage or growth lending,” said David Spreng, founder and chief executive of Runway Growth Capital, a lender to venture-backed start-ups.

SVB specialised in the early-stage market where many larger banks had stayed away because of the risks involved.

“A lot of people have raised their…