PitchBook’s 2026 Top Universities, Ranked By Number Of MBA Startup Founders

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PITCHBOOK’S BEST UNIVERSITIES FOR FEMALE FOUNDERS

PitchBook analyzed educational information for more than 222,000 VC-backed founders, compared to more than 173,000 in its 2025 ranking.

This year’s ranking counts founders whose companies received a round of venture funding between January 1, 2015 and August 1, 2026. Qualifying funding includes seed, early- and later-stage venture capital, angel investment and several restart funding categories. Because companies can have multiple founders — and founders can attend more than one university — the same company or entrepreneur can be credited to multiple schools. Pitchbook breaks it results into separate lists for MBA, graduate, and undergraduate categories, as well as female founders and European University MBA founders.

Data used comes from the PitchBook Platform or is collected from publicly available and primary sources.

PitchBook 2026: Female MBA Founders
2026 Rank
University
Founder Count
Company Count
Capital Raised
Change vs. 2025
1 Harvard University 467 441 $12.9B –
2 Stanford University 296 281 $17.1B –
3 University of Pennsylvania 197 189 $5.6B –
4 Columbia University 167 164 $3.8B –
5 Northwestern University 165 161 $6.3B ⬇ –1
T6 MIT 154 152 $4.5B ⬆ +1
T6 INSEAD 154 147 $2.4B –
8 University of Chicago 118 117 $2.7B –
9 London Business School 93 89 $1.1B –
10 UC Berkeley 87 85 $2.4B –
11 New York University 86 85 $1.1B –
12 UCLA 62 60 $1.5B –
13 IESE Business School 46 46 $1.2B ⬆ +59
14 University of Oxford 45 42 $417M ⬇ –1
15 Cornell University 44 43 $694M ⬇ –1
16 IE University 40 40 $523M ⬆ +7
17 Yale University 39 39 $594M ⬇ –1
18 Tel Aviv University 37 37 $818M ⬇ –2
19 Arizona State University, Tempe 36 36 $431M –
20 HEC Paris 35 35 $772M ⬇ –4
21 Duke University 34 33 $277M ⬇ –6
22 USC 33 33 $693M ⬇ –2
T23 ESADE 32 32 $168M ⬇ –3
T23 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 32 32 $770M ⬇ –1
25 Babson College 28 28 $466M –