Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

Crunchbase News has compiled its annual listing of the U.S. universities that graduate the highest number of recently funded start-up founders, and the 2023 rankings are fairly predictable with a few notable exceptions.

The leading universities for funded founders are Stanford, MIT, University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and Harvard. The top business schools are Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton. Crunchbase News did note that two state universities – UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and the University of Michigan, rose in the ranks compared to the previous year, and MIT’s Sloan School of Management posted a notably stronger showing.

Just how far ahead of the field is Stanford? It was credited with 472 founders, nearly 50 percent more than MIT with 325. UC Berkeley produced 297 founders followed by Harvard with 281. No other university exceeded 200.

The highest-ranked soon-to-be Southeastern Conference (SEC) school is the University of Texas in Austin (#14). No other current or upcoming SEC school made the list. Duke University placed #16, while Georgia Tech was #19, the University of Virginia was #24, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill placed #35.

The dataset used for the rankings, which can be found here, looked at founders of companies that raised their last private funding rounds in 2022 and 2023 and pulled in $1 million or more to date.

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