Infographic – Stanford, MIT Lead Start-Up Alma Maters

Chart: start-up founder universities — Click on image for full-size view (Crunchbase News)

20 Mar. 2021. If you follow science and technology start-ups, you see a recurring pattern of spin-off businesses from many of the same universities, and a chart posted yesterday by Crunchbase News confirms it. The founders of start-up tech companies in the U.S. raising $1 million or more since 1 Jan. 2020 come from mainly top research institutions.

Leading the pack is Stanford University with 465 tech start-up founders, followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology with 367. Among the leaders are Harvard University with 293 entrepreneurs and University of California in Berkeley with 277. Universities with more than 100 graduate founders are also top research institutions: Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale.

The list shows many of the top-ranked schools are in or near technology hot spots in New England, San Francisco/Silicon Valley, and New York City. But Crunchbase notes that universities in the South, notably University of Texas in Austin and Duke University are moving up the list, indicating growing tech hotspots in North Carolina’s Research Triangle and central Texas.

Crunchbase created the list from its database of tech start-ups, founders, and funding rounds, but excluded business school graduates, which it compiles in a separate list. That business school list is led by Harvard with 254 tech start-up founders, Wharton School of Business at UPenn with 144, and Stanford with 139.