Deciphering Entrepreneurial Pitches: A Multimodal Deep Learning Approach to Predict Probability of Investment

Abstract

Acquiring early-stage investments for the purpose of developing a business is a fundamental aspect of the entrepreneurial process, which regularly entails pitching the business proposal to potential investors. Previous research suggests that business viability data and the perception of the entrepreneur play an important role in the investment decision-making process. This perception of the entrepreneur is shaped by verbal and non-verbal behavioral cues produced in investor-entrepreneur interactions. This study explores the impact of such cues on decisions that involve investing in a startup on the basis of a pitch. A multimodal approach is developed in which acoustic and linguistic features are extracted from recordings of entrepreneurial pitches to predict the likelihood of investment. The acoustic and linguistic modalities are represented using both hand-crafted and deep features. The capabilities of deep learning models are exploited to capture the temporal dynamics of the inputs. The findings show promising results for the prediction of the likelihood of investment using a multimodal architecture consisting of acoustic and linguistic features. Models based on deep features generally outperform hand-crafted representations. Experiments with an explainable model provide insights about the important features. The most predictive model is found to be a multimodal one that combines deep acoustic and linguistic features using an early fusion strategy and achieves an MAE of 13.91.