The purpose of this paper is to propose a new binary classification method for predicting corporate failure based on genetic algorithm, and to validate its prediction power through empirical analysis. Establishing virtual companies representing bankrupt companies and non-bankrupt ones respectively, the proposed method measures the similarity between the virtual companies and the subject for prediction, and classifies the subject into either bankrupt or non-bankrupt one. The values of the classification variables of the virtual companies and the weights of the variables are determined by the proper model to maximize the hit ratio of training data set using genetic algorithm. In order to test the validity of the proposed method, we compare its prediction accuracy with ones of other existing methods such as multi-discriminant analysis, logistic regression, decision tree, and artificial neural network, and it is shown that the binary classification method we propose in this paper can serve as a premising alternative to the existing methods for bankruptcy prediction.