Abstract: In the wave of digital transformation, new ventures choose to imitate mature enterprises or explore differentiated paths, which becomes the key strategic decision-making that determines the survival and development of enterprises. How the digitalization level of enterprises empowers new ventures to improve their performance has important practical value and theoretical significance. Based on the theory of the availability of digital technology, empirical analysis of 313 new venture questionnaires of shows that: digitalization level significantly promotes new venture performance improvement, exploitative learning, rather than exploratory learning, is the key pathway through which new start-ups improve their performance. Additionally, digital investment demonstrates a nonlinear moderating effect between digitalization level and new venture performance, suggesting that under resource constraints, firms should avoid the risk of diminishing marginal returns triggered by excessive digital investment. New ventures’ digitalization level drives performance growth through a differentiated mechanism of ambidextrous learning, with exploitative learning constituting the optimal adaptation strategy in resource-constrained contexts. These findings offer implications for new ventures: they must not only adhere to the threshold dynamics of digital capability building but also construct a dynamic learning framework to maximize technological dividends.