PitchBook University Rankings: Undergraduate Founders

PitchBook's annual ranking of universities by the number of undergraduate alumni who founded VC-backed companies over a trailing window. Founders and investors use it as a quick read on which schools feed the startup pipeline; UC Berkeley has led since 2023 on its own count, after years of Stanford at the top.

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Editions

Edition	Published	Top of the list	On record
2026	September 1, 2026	University of California, Berkeley	100 of 101
2025	September 2025	University of California, Berkeley	101
2024	September 2024	University of California, Berkeley	100
2023	September 11, 2023	Stanford University	5
2022 Method changed	October 31, 2022	Stanford University	5 of 100
2021	November 16, 2021	Stanford University	3 of 50
2020	September 21, 2020	Not recorded	At the publisher
2019	September 5, 2019	Not recorded	At the publisher
2018-2019 Edition	August 30, 2018	Stanford University	50
2017-2018 Edition	September 2017	Stanford University	50
2016-2017 Edition	September 6, 2016	Not recorded	At the publisher
2015-2016 Edition	September 24, 2015	Stanford	10 of 50
2014	August 28, 2014	Stanford University	9 of 50

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: Undergraduate 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.

First edition year unconfirmed: the September 2015 report called itself the third edition, implying a first edition around 2013 or early 2014.
Exact release days for the 2025 and 2024 editions not confirmed on PitchBook's site (dates from Poets&Quants and Berkeley News).
2023 leader is ambiguous: Stanford had 2 more founders (1,435 vs. 1,433) while Berkeley had more companies; Berkeley counts 2023 as its first year at No. 1.
Full lists for 2019 to 2023 exist only in PitchBook's interactive tables and Excel files, which were not readable.
2016-2017 Edition PDF not accessible (robots.txt); its rankings are not loaded.
Transcriptions from Poets&Quants tables were made via automated page reading; spot checks against year-over-year changes matched, but individual figures should be verified before publication.

Superscout describes PitchBook University Rankings: Undergraduate Founders independently from the publisher’s own pages and outside coverage, linked below. The rankings belong to PitchBook.

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Last reviewed Sep 23, 2026.