High-growth entrepreneurship is at the heart of the Europe 2020 strategy, driving industrial dynamism and creating new job opportunities. Unfortunately, many new business ventures face early failure due to difficulties in establishing external legitimacy and building trust relationships with key stakeholders, including banks and financial institutions. This structural vulnerability, often referred to as the “Liability of newness”, represents a significant barrier to the survival of new ventures. To enhance the survival chances of new businesses, European governments have recently introduced the so-called Credit Guarantee Schemes (CGS), such as the “Italian Central Guarantee Fund” (CGF). While these policy measures are intended to improve financing opportunities for young entrepreneurial ventures, their impact on long-term survival remains unclear. A relevant but still little explored topic in the literature is the role of potential moderating factors that could influence the effectiveness of these financial support measures. This chapter aims to fill this empirical gap by examining the potential drawbacks of the Italian CGF and evaluating how debt policies affect the survival prospects of new ventures. The empirical analysis uses a discrete time survival model, analyzing longitudinal dataset of 20,509 Italian new entrepreneurial ventures from the 2013 birth cohort, spanning the period from 2013 to 2022.