Research Article Is Equity Crowdfunding the Leapfrog to Companies’ Success? Financial Performance in China Chang Jiang , Raquel P´ erez-Est´ ebanez , and Elena Urqu´ ıa-Grande Faculty of Economics & Business, Department of Financial Administration and Accounting, Complutense University of Madrid, 28223 Madrid, Spain Correspondence should be addressed to Chang Jiang; chanjian@ucm.es Received 16 June 2022; Revised 26 July 2022; Accepted 1 August 2022; Published 29 August 2022 Academic Editor: Kapil Sharma Copyright © 2022 Chang Jiang et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. As the fastest-growing crowdfunding model, equity crowdfunding (ECF) brings high returns and uncertainty. In this context, it is crucial to understand these crowdfunding projects’ actual performance. Since ECF is currently in the early stage of integration, there are still a lot of risk issues, such as the uncertainty of equity structure, capital supervision, or project management. erefore, this paper develops a new profitability indicator, “return on registered capital,” to test its impact on the ECF project’s actual return. is paper studies which factors affect the financial performance of ECF projects through the traditional statistical model and a deep neural network (DNN) model. ere is evidence that return on registered capital affects the actual return of the project. At the same time, the company’s operating time and the number of employees had an unexpected effect on project performance. In addition, the recognition accuracy of the DNN model in this study exceeds 97%, which affirms the applicability of the DNN model in the analysis of ECF success factors. is paper also uses tenfold cross-validation to prove that deep learning has certain advantages in this topic’s accuracy and generalization error. is study explores whether company representatives’ gender and knowledge level affect project performance. e results will be described in detail in the paper. 1. Introduction e Internet has changed the way of social communication and people’s way of life, and it also had a massive impact on the financial industry’s innovation. Entrepreneurs, especially in SMEs, have difficulty obtaining business loans or in- vestments in the early stages of their business, resulting in many projects ultimately failing. With the continuous de- velopment of Internet finance, many new financing methods have emerged. Crowdfunding is one of them, it is a “pre- consumption” model that applies to ordinary backers by raising their investments to fund projects, and they can also earn future profits through projects [1]. Generally, scholars divide crowdfunding into four cat- egories: donation-based, reward-based, equity, and lending. Equity crowdfunding (ECF) has developed rapidly in recent years as a subcategory of crowdfunding. Vulkan et al. [2] pointed out in their research that the development of ECF will pose a massive challenge to venture capital and business angel financiers in the future. Several years have passed, and until now, facts have proved that ECF has substantially impacted traditional investment fields. e existing research on the ECF theme has developed rapidly in recent years. On the one hand, some researchers have studied ECF development, such as ECF and pervasive finance [3], market size and geographical distribution [4], and plagiarizing product ideas [5]. On the other hand, some researchers have paid attention to ECF’s performance and success factors’ internal activities. is direction has become a hot spot for ECF research nowadays. Some researchers focus on the project sponsors’ social capital [6], the static factors like the ultimate campaign outcome of innovative companies [7, 8], and the return on investment [9, 10] all the factors on project success. As a new investment and financing mechanism, entre- preneurs who need funds can use ECF for rapid financing. e public can also use ECF to support projects that require funds and obtain high returns. Also, it brings great un- certainty. erefore, the present research proposes a new idea to improve the performance research of ECF. Unlike Hindawi Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience Volume 2022, Article ID 7814550, 12 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/7814550