PitchBook University Rankings: MBA Founders

Editions

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.

Read the publisher’s methodology

How far to trust it

Superscout grades every ranking on six criteria, each scored 0 to 2. PitchBook University Rankings: MBA 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.

Open questions

Facts not verified yet. They stay visible so they are not mistaken for settled facts.

• 2026 full MBA list: Poets&Quants page returned 521 errors; retry later.
• MBA lists for 2016, 2019, 2020, 2022 not found; in 2022 PitchBook appears to have folded MBAs into a graduate list (The Daily Pennsylvanian lists four 2022 categories without an MBA list).
• 2023 MBA leader not confirmed.
• First edition year unconfirmed (see undergraduate file).