As a venture capitalist, where should I put my money if there are thousands of startups and half of

them will die within 5 years?

UnicornHuntr: Predict the success of early-stage startups*success = receive series A funding

Yun Lee +

Random forest classifier• Training: 2+ year-old startups (n = 4565)• Testing: new startups (n = 1760)

Numerical features• total pre-series A funding• employee growth rate• # news coverage

Categorical features• industries• business models

5-fold cross validationaccuracy = 0.81

Popularity matters

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