PitchBook University Rankings: Female Founders
PitchBook's annual ranking of universities by the number of female alumni who founded VC-backed companies, with undergraduate, graduate and MBA cuts. UC Berkeley has led the undergraduate list since 2024; Stanford led earlier editions found.
- Reliability
- Grade B · 10/12
- Publisher
- PitchBook
- Ranks
- Universities, Female undergraduate alumni (graduate and MBA female lists also published)
- Editions
- 9
- Method
- Data
- How items get in
- Compiled by the publisher
- Status
- Active
Editions
| Edition | Published | Top of the list | On record |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | September 1, 2026 | University of California, Berkeley | 50 |
| 2025 | September 2025 | University of California, Berkeley | 50 |
| 2024 | September 2024 | University of California, Berkeley | 50 |
| 2023 | September 11, 2023 | Not recorded | 2 |
| 2022 | October 31, 2022 | Stanford University | 2 |
| 2021 | November 16, 2021 | Stanford University | 1 |
| 2018-2019 Edition | August 30, 2018 | Stanford University | 1 |
| 2017 | September 6, 2017 | Not recorded | At the publisher |
| 2016-2017 Edition | September 6, 2016 | Not recorded | At the publisher |
How the ranking works
PitchBook counts alumni who founded companies that raised venture funding in a trailing window, using education records in the PitchBook platform gathered from public and primary sources. The 2026 edition covers founders whose companies raised a Seed, Early Stage VC, Later Stage VC, Angel or Restart round between Jan. 1, 2015 and Aug. 1, 2026 (more than 222,000 founders). Schools are ranked by founder count; company count and total capital raised are shown but do not set the rank. A founder who attended several schools, and a company with several founders, can count toward more than one school.
Ranked positions: Each item has a position (1, 2, 3), with ties allowed. Schools cannot apply or pay; rankings are computed from PitchBook's founder database. PitchBook is a commercial data vendor (owned by Morningstar) whose clients include investors and universities.
How far to trust it
Superscout grades every ranking on six criteria, each scored 0 to 2. PitchBook University Rankings: Female Founders scores 10 of 12, grade B.
- Transparency 2/2
- Single metric (founder count) and date window are stated in each edition.
- Independence 2/2
- Built from PitchBook's own database; schools do not apply or pay to be listed.
- Evidence 2/2
- Counts of VC-backed founders and capital raised are hard data, although the underlying records are proprietary.
- Stability 1/2
- Rolling window, and the lookback and list lengths changed (2006 start until 2021, roughly 10 years from 2022).
- Coverage 1/2
- Publishes a top slice (50 to 100 schools) out of a global founder database.
- Track record 2/2
- More than ten annual editions since the mid-2010s.
History
PitchBook began publishing university rankings of VC-backed founders around 2013 to 2014; its September 2015 report called itself the third edition. Early editions were PDF reports (for example the 2015-2016, 2016-2017, 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 editions) that ranked the top 50 undergraduate and MBA programs over a window starting in 2006 or 2010. In 2019 PitchBook moved to an interactive web table, and in 2022 it shortened the window to roughly the last 10 years (previously about 15), expanded to top 100 lists and added a graduate list. Since 2024 it publishes undergraduate, graduate and MBA lists plus female-founder and European editions each September.
How it is received
The rankings are widely republished by Poets&Quants, Forbes and university news offices, and schools such as UC Berkeley, Penn and Waterloo cite them in press releases. Because the metric is a raw count, it favors large universities and long-established alumni bases, and PitchBook itself notes that founders and companies can be counted at more than one school. The lead can hinge on the chosen metric: in 2023 Berkeley alumni founded more companies (1,305 vs. 1,297) while Stanford had slightly more founders (1,435 vs. 1,433), per Berkeley Haas.
Strengths
- Based on hard counts of VC-backed founders rather than surveys or reputation.
- Free to read, with full lists republished each year.
- Separate undergraduate, graduate, MBA, female-founder and European cuts.
- Long run of annual editions allows year-over-year comparison.
Weaknesses
- Raw counts favor large schools; no adjustment for alumni size.
- Rolling window and changing lookback periods make long-run comparisons imperfect.
- Depends on the completeness of education data in a proprietary database.
- Founders and companies can be counted at several schools.
Open questions
Facts not verified yet. They stay visible so they are not mistaken for settled facts.
- Edition entries track the undergraduate female list; graduate and MBA female lists are not loaded.
- 2023 female undergraduate leader not confirmed (Berkeley was 2nd).
- Whether the 2018 female leader figure (Stanford 162) is undergraduate-only is not confirmed.
Superscout describes PitchBook University Rankings: Female Founders independently from the publisher’s own pages and outside coverage, linked below. The rankings belong to PitchBook.
Sources and known limits
Last reviewed .
- Top universities for female founders (2026)
- Poets&Quants for Undergrads 2026 female table
- Poets&Quants for Undergrads 2025 female table
- Poets&Quants for Undergrads 2024 female table
- University of California: Berkeley top in companies founded (2023)
- Daily Pennsylvanian 2023
- Poets&Quants for Undergrads 2022
- 2021 PitchBook rankings
- 2018-2019 Edition PDF
- Female founders are most likely to come from these schools (2017)
- 2016-2017 PitchBook Universities