- Crunchbase tracked which colleges had the most startup-founder graduates get recent private funding.
- Stanford led, with 472 grads, and its fellow Cali schools UC Berkeley and USC were in the top 10.
- Six Cali schools were in the top-36 list, which tracked startup funding since the start of 2022.
Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California rank among some of the top schools to produce startup founders that recently got private funding, according to Crunchbase.
Crunchbase rounded up a list of the top 36 colleges in the US whose graduates have attained $1 million or more in funding for their startups since the beginning of 2022.
Stanford topped the list of schools with 472 graduates, Berkeley ranked third with 297 graduate-turned-funded founders and USC rounded up the top 10 with 113.
Other California-based colleges to make the list of schools include the University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, San Diego, and the California Institute of Technology.
The data also details the business schools that some of the startup founders attended. And three of those schools based in California also ranked in the top 10: Stanford Business School, the UCLA Anderson School of Management, and the Haas School of Business at Berkeley.
Many of the world's biggest technology companies have been founded by grads of these elite universities. Alphabet cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google while they were PhD students at Stanford, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and Intel cofounder Gordon Moore are alums of Berkeley, and Marc Benioff, cofounder and CEO of Salesforce, graduated from USC in the mid-1980s.
Tech companies have been raiding universities in search of tech talent, with a recent focus on those excelling in AI. The fact that hundreds of new startup founders have been able to secure funding is a bit surprising considering the current state of the venture capital industry.
Venture capital funding for startups overall has tapered off significantly since the highs of 2020 and 2021. That's largely due in part to the uncertainty of the stock market and rising interest rates. Funding to startups in North America dropped to $46.3 billion in the first quarter of 2023, a nearly 50% drop from the same period last year, according to Crunchbase. The number of deals done in Q1 this year has also plunged about 50%, the data shows.
Yet, funding for earlier-stage startups — likely some of the companies these grads are founding — remains relatively strong considering the current state of the private market.
