This paper studies an inverse problem to determine a nonlinearity of an autonomous equation from blow-up time of solutions to the equation. Firstly we prove a global continuation result showing that a nonlinearity realizing blow-up time for large initial data can be continued in the direction of smaller data as long as the blow-up time is Lipschitz continuous. Secondly we develop a method based upon a Wiener–Hopf structure by which the existence and uniqueness of a nonlinearity realizing blow-up time for large initial data is shown. These enable us to establish a global existence and uniqueness result for the inverse problem.