What Matters Most? A Quantitative Meta-Analysis of AI-Based Predictors for Startup Success

Background: Predicting startup success with machine learning is a rapidly growing field, yet findings on key predictors are often fragmented and context-specific. This makes it difficult to discern robust patterns and highlights a need for a systematic synthesis of the evidence. Methods: This study conducts a quantitative meta-analysis to synthesize the literature on predictor importance in AI-based startup evaluation. We performed a systematic review to identify a final sample of 13 empirical studies that report rankable feature importance. From these papers, we extracted and categorized 58 unique predictors, synthesizing their importance using a Weighted Importance Score (WIS) that balances a feature's average rank with its frequency of appearance. We also conducted a moderator analysis to investigate how predictor importance changes with context (e.g., success definition). Results: Our aggregate analysis reveals that the most consistently powerful predictors are a quartet of foundational attributes: Firm Characteristics (e.g., age, location), Investor Structure (e.g., investor quality), Digital and Social Traction (e.g., online momentum), and Funding History. The moderator analysis further reveals that this hierarchy is highly context-dependent. For instance, predicting near-term funding milestones elevates the importance of the deal's immediate context, while predicting long-term exits prioritizes fundamental firm and investor characteristics. Conclusion: The factors that best predict startup success are not universal but are contingent on the startup's goals, stage, and the data used for evaluation. Our findings point to a potential "convenience bias" in the literature, where predictor importance may be tied to data accessibility. We conclude by underscoring the need for standardized reporting practices to enable more robust, cumulative knowledge building in the field.