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Main Authors: Pei, Haoyu, Liu, Zhongyang, Xiao, Xiangyi, Du, Xiaocong, Hong, Suting, Zhang, Kunpeng, Zhang, Haipeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23489
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author Pei, Haoyu
Liu, Zhongyang
Xiao, Xiangyi
Du, Xiaocong
Hong, Suting
Zhang, Kunpeng
Zhang, Haipeng
author_facet Pei, Haoyu
Liu, Zhongyang
Xiao, Xiangyi
Du, Xiaocong
Hong, Suting
Zhang, Kunpeng
Zhang, Haipeng
contents Most venture capital (VC) investments fail, while a few deliver outsized returns. Accurately predicting startup success requires synthesizing complex relational evidence, including company disclosures, investor track records, and investment network structures, through explicit reasoning to form coherent, interpretable investment theses. Traditional machine learning and graph neural networks both lack this reasoning capability. Large language models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning but face a modality mismatch with graphs. Recent graph-LLM methods target in-graph tasks where answers lie within the graph, whereas VC prediction is off-graph: the target exists outside the network. The core challenge is selecting graph paths that maximize predictor performance on an external objective while enabling step-by-step reasoning. We present MIRAGE-VC, a multi-perspective retrieval-augmented generation framework that addresses two obstacles: path explosion (thousands of candidate paths overwhelm LLM context) and heterogeneous evidence fusion (different startups need different analytical emphasis). Our information-gain-driven path retriever iteratively selects high-value neighbors, distilling investment networks into compact chains for explicit reasoning. A multi-agent architecture integrates three evidence streams via a learnable gating mechanism based on company attributes. Under strict anti-leakage controls, MIRAGE-VC achieves +5.0% F1 and +16.6% PrecisionAt5, and sheds light on other off-graph prediction tasks such as recommendation and risk assessment. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MIRAGE-VC-323F.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_23489
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Gaining Paths to Investment Success: Information-Driven LLM Graph Reasoning for Venture Capital Prediction
Pei, Haoyu
Liu, Zhongyang
Xiao, Xiangyi
Du, Xiaocong
Hong, Suting
Zhang, Kunpeng
Zhang, Haipeng
Artificial Intelligence
Most venture capital (VC) investments fail, while a few deliver outsized returns. Accurately predicting startup success requires synthesizing complex relational evidence, including company disclosures, investor track records, and investment network structures, through explicit reasoning to form coherent, interpretable investment theses. Traditional machine learning and graph neural networks both lack this reasoning capability. Large language models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning but face a modality mismatch with graphs. Recent graph-LLM methods target in-graph tasks where answers lie within the graph, whereas VC prediction is off-graph: the target exists outside the network. The core challenge is selecting graph paths that maximize predictor performance on an external objective while enabling step-by-step reasoning. We present MIRAGE-VC, a multi-perspective retrieval-augmented generation framework that addresses two obstacles: path explosion (thousands of candidate paths overwhelm LLM context) and heterogeneous evidence fusion (different startups need different analytical emphasis). Our information-gain-driven path retriever iteratively selects high-value neighbors, distilling investment networks into compact chains for explicit reasoning. A multi-agent architecture integrates three evidence streams via a learnable gating mechanism based on company attributes. Under strict anti-leakage controls, MIRAGE-VC achieves +5.0% F1 and +16.6% PrecisionAt5, and sheds light on other off-graph prediction tasks such as recommendation and risk assessment. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MIRAGE-VC-323F.
title The Gaining Paths to Investment Success: Information-Driven LLM Graph Reasoning for Venture Capital Prediction
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23489