Stanford Alumni 5x More Likely to Secure VC Funding Than Carnegie Mellon
Based on venture funding raised by companies in the US since June 2020
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
Largest headcount in the US
Raised their last venture funding after June, 2020
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
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.
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.
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
How does funding amount relate to school and graduation major of founder?
Relation between founder’s education background and their approval rating by employees.
And many similar topics.
Interested in complete data for this post?
Get single CSV with complete data on 12,331 companies, their headcount growth metrics and founders education background - download for just $4.99
About the data
The data seen above is from Crustdata - an AI powered data-driven market intelligence platform for private growth stage investors. It indexes billions of public data points on companies every week to provide an edge over the private market.
This is really interesting! A side note, it seems like the data in the graph needs some cleaning, there are several entries for some schools. Good stuff though!