Where Funded Founders Went To School: 2026 Edition

Founding a successful startup requires a combination of ingenuity and mettle that one can’t easily learn in school. Nonetheless, attending a prestigious university certainly seems to help.

Those are once again the findings from our annual Crunchbase survey of where recently funded founders attended college or university. We found that alumni of the most selective U.S. schools secure a disproportionately high share of startup funding rounds.

There were no surprising names at the top of the list. The usual frontrunners — Stanford, Harvard, MIT and The University of California, Berkeley  — once again topped our ranking.

Several prestigious public research universities also scored high, along with a handful of private schools known for competitive admissions processes. Schools in or near metro areas that are startup funding hubs also showed an edge.

To illustrate, we ranked the top 37 schools for funded founders below. The ranking tracks the number of founders affiliated with each school whose startups raised seed through growth-stage funding this past year.

Let’s not understate the dominance of the leading schools

It might be nice to write a story about how choice of school need not affect one’s chances of venture-backed startup success. The data, however, indicates quite the opposite.

The dominance of alums from the top-ranked schools should not be understated. Over the past year, just over 4,400 rounds of $500,000 or more went to founders with U.S. university affiliations in Crunchbase. Of those rounds, roughly half went to companies with at least one founder who attended one of the top seven schools.

The top three are particularly heavy hitters, with startups with Stanford, Harvard and MIT alumni as founders drawing more than 30% of funding rounds we tracked to U.S. university-affiliated founders.

Moreover, alums of top-ranked schools also scored many of the largest funding rounds of the past year.

Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei has degrees from Stanford and Princeton. And among recently founded heavy hitters, Michael Truell, co-founder of the company behind AI coding tool Cursor, is an MIT grad.

OpenAI is a weird one in that its founding leadership includes prestigious college dropouts. CEO and co-founder Sam Altman attended Stanford, while president and co-founder Greg Brockman attended MIT and Harvard. Neither got a degree.

Flagship public universities underperform

In the realm of public universities, once again, data contradicts the preferred narrative.

Fans of flagship public universities know that these are venerable institutions when it comes to education, research and preparing graduates for successful careers. Yet despite the fact that a majority of American college students attend public institutions, these schools are not heavily represented at the top of our funded founder rankings.

UC Berkeley, of course, is the exception. As a highly selective university close to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, it’s reliably in the top four and is renowned in particular for its engineering talent. The only other public university in our top 10 is University of Michigan, which benefits from its large size, strong reputation and engineering talent, particularly with the growth in physical AI as a venture investment hot spot.

Now, we don’t want to sound too negative. While public universities don’t top the ranks, flagship schools nonetheless do churn out a lot of funded founders. Some that made our ranking include UCLA, Georgia Tech, University of Washington, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin-Madison and The University of Texas at Austin, among others.

Ivies and other selective private schools

Every one of the eight universities in the Ivy League made our ranking, indicating that these East Coast institutions founded in the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s are also pretty adept at launching students into the present-day startup ecosystem.

Other private universities that ranked high include Carnegie Mellon, known for its robotics prowess, NYU, which benefits from its Manhattan locale, and University of Southern California, which has become increasingly competitive for admissions in recent decades.

Business schools are heavy contributors

It’s also worth noting that for many universities, a high portion of funded founder alumni attended their business schools.

Among founders from University of Pennsylvania raising funds this past year, a whopping 60% went to its Wharton School of Business. For Harvard, 38% of funded founders in our 2026 analysis attended Harvard Business School. And at Northwestern, more than a quarter went to its Kellogg School of Management.

While enrollment in U.S. MBA programs overall has been declining in recent years, among funded founder types, degrees from top-tier schools are clearly still opening doors.

No success without trying

The missing metric in all this analysis is something that Crunchbase data doesn’t capture: Who are the founders who tried unsuccessfully to build funded startups and where did they go to school?

Given this blank spot in the data, it’s hard to say if the preponderance of funded founders from prestige schools is the result of more of them attempting to build startups or having a higher success rate, or both.

My guess would be it’s a mix of both. We hear about the Harvard or Stanford dropouts who became billionaires. But surely there are many more would-be entrepreneurs we never hear about who took a leave of absence from school, tried something without success, and then returned to complete their degrees. Or those who launched dorm room startups that didn’t become the next Facebook.

Either way, it does seem to help one’s chances of being a funded founder to attend a school in a location like the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston or New York City. Networking comes easier when one is already geographically in the center of the action.

Related reading:

• Google, Stanford And The IDF: Professional Backgrounds Of Unicorn Founders
• Where Funded Founders Went To School: 2025 Edition
• These US Universities Graduate The Highest Number Of Funded Founders
• Pandemic Didn’t Alter Dominance Of Stanford, Harvard Or MIT For Funded Founders

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias