The COVID-19 pandemic has battered industries around the world, but one sector's prospects aren’t so bleak: venture capital.

Startup backers—and private-equity managers in general—say that half of their portfolio companies haven’t been harmed by the coronavirus that stalled the economy in March, according to two new surveys by Paul A. Gompers, the Eugene Holman Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Only about 10 percent of companies in this often unpredictable industry have been severely affected. READ MORE