To understand the correlation between venture funding and a founder’s education background, I looked at the founding teams of all the companies that have

1. Largest headcount in the US

2. Raised their last venture funding after June, 2020

3. Raised more than $5m in total

Of 12,331 companies that met this criteria, Stanford University topped the list with 941 companies founded by alumni of Stanford University (including Stanford Graduate Business School). Then came MIT, with 637 of companies founded by its alumni (including MIT - Sloan School of Management).

Below is the much broader list containing all the schools whose alumni founded more than 40 companies that met the above criteria.

Some other takeaways from this data

1. An alumnus of top Computer Science school like Carnegie Mellon University, is 5 times less likely to raise venture funding than their counterpart at Stanford.

2. Almost 25% companies (2,940 out of total 12,331) were founded by alumni of Stanford University, UC Berkeley, MIT and Harvard. This correlates to the fact that most of the venture capitalists are based out of Bay Area and/or Cambridge, Massachusetts.

3. Y Combinator is the only startup accelerator which features in this list. 160 or 1.2% of all the above companies were part of there program.

Below is list of fastest growing companies by headcount over last quarter from the list above along with the education history of their founders.

Stay tuned

In the upcoming articles, I will cover

1. How does funding amount relate to school and graduation major of founder?

2. Relation between founder’s education background and their approval rating by employees.

3. And many similar topics.

Interested in complete data for this post?

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About the data

The data seen above is from Crustdata - the most accurate realtime company and people data source for AI Agents and platforms. We index billions of public data points to provide live data APIs to power your products and processes.