  Investors are interested in predicting future success of startup companies,
preferably using publicly available data which can be gathered using free
online sources. Using public-only data has been shown to work, but there is
still much room for improvement. Two of the best performing prediction
experiments use 17 and 49 features respectively, mostly numeric and categorical
in nature. In this paper, we significantly expand and diversify both the
sources and the number of features (to 171) to achieve better prediction. Data
collected from Crunchbase, the Google Search API, and Twitter (now X) are used
to predict whether a company will raise a round of funding within a fixed time
horizon. Much of the new features are textual and the Twitter subset include
linguistic metrics such as measures of passive voice and parts-of-speech. A
total of ten machine learning models are also evaluated for best performance.
The adaptable model can be used to predict funding 1-5 years into the future,
with a variable cutoff threshold to favor either precision or recall.
Prediction with comparable assumptions generally achieves F scores above 0.730
which outperforms previous attempts in the literature (0.531), and does so with
fewer examples. Furthermore, we find that the vast majority of the performance
impact comes from the top 18 of 171 features which are mostly generic company
observations, including the best performing individual feature which is the
free-form text description of the company.
