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

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If the question is which MBA programs produce the most founders over the last decade, the answer is the same as last year. And the year before that.

Harvard Business School again topped PitchBook’s annual ranking of MBA programs for producing venture-backed entrepreneurs, this time with 2,444 alumni founders creating 2,235 companies. That’s 538 more founders than PitchBook counted for Harvard just a year ago. Those companies have raised a combined $153.5 billion.

Stanford Graduate School of Business held at No. 2 with 1,504 MBA founders and 1,359 companies and $96.8 billion raised.

University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School,  France’s INSEAD, and Columbia Business School rounded out the top 5.

PitchBook’s Top 10 2026: MBA Founders
2026 Rank
University
Founder Count
Company Count
Capital Raised
Change vs. 2025
1 Harvard University 2,444 2,235 $153.5B –
2 Stanford University 1,504 1,359 $96.8B –
3 University of Pennsylvania 1,437 1,332 $80.3B –
4 INSEAD 1,112 1,032 $39.6B –
5 Columbia University 1,019 954 $38.7B –
6 Northwestern University 1,015 966 $33.9B –
7 MIT 934 858 $42.6B ↑ +1
8 University of Chicago 884 823 $29.8B ↓ –1
9 UC Berkeley 705 650 $27.5B –
10 London Business School 568 528 $19.0B –

PitchBook — a database for mergers and acquisitions, private equity, and venture capital —  ranks 50 MBA programs from around the world for its annual list.

The same 10 universities that made PitchBook’s MBA top 10 last year were back again in 2026. The only movement is MIT and University of Chicago swapping places. MIT rose one spot to No. 7 while Chicago slipped to No. 8.

TOP UNIVERSITIES FOR MBA FOUNDERS

PitchBook compiles its annual university rankings by tallying alumni entrepreneurs whose companies have attracted venture capital over the last decade.

Its 2026 analysis is considerably larger than the one released a year ago. 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.

Harvard’s highest earning company is Grab Holdings at $10.1 billion, charging ahead of last year’s top company Northvolt at $6.9 billion. Gojek (raising $5.5 billion) and Generate ($4.3 billion) are the next highest.

The highest earning companies for Stanford GSB include Social Finance ($3.6 billion), Cerebras Systems ($2.9 billion), and Kavak ($2.9 billion.)

Harvard also tops this list by number of female founders (467 compared to Stanford’s 296), but companies founded by Stanford female entrepreneurs earned more over the last decade ($17.1 billion compared to $12.9 billion.)

Click to page 2 for the ranking by number of MBA female founders.

GOOD B-SCHOOLS MAKE LOTS OF ENTREPRENEURS

If the ranking looks familiar to anyone who follows elite MBA programs, it should.

All of the M7s appear in the top 10 of Pitchbook’s list.  Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, which this year topped Poets&Quants’ composite ranking of the best MBA programs in the U.S. for the second time, had the sixth most MBA founders for global universities, according to Pitchbook. That’s 1,015 MBA founders, 966 companies, and earning $33.9 billion in the last decade.

U.S. schools likewise continue to dominate the MBA ranking. Eight of the top 10 and 14 of the top 20 are American universities. INSEAD and London Business School are the only international programs in the top 10, while IE, IESE and HEC Paris give continental Europe three more programs in the top 20. Tel Aviv University, at No. 13, is the highest-ranked MBA program outside the U.S. and Europe.

Click to page 3 for Pitchbook’s best European MBAs for entrepreneurs ranking.

PITCHBOOK’S BEST UNIVERSITIES FOR MBA FOUNDERS

Most of the movement in PitchBook’s 2026 MBA ranking happens outside the very top, where the hierarchy remains remarkably stable.

The biggest mover by far is IESE Business School, which rose 37 places to No. 15. Western University in Canada, home to Ivey Business School, climbed eight spots to a tie at No. 42. Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business jumped five places while Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business rose four.

On the other end, Georgetown McDonough and ESSEC Business School took the steepest falls among the top 50, each dropping six positions. Oxford and Indian School of Business slid four spots apiece.

The much bigger change is in the raw numbers. Founder counts rose sharply across much of this year’s ranking, but that doesn’t mean hundreds of new MBA entrepreneurs suddenly emerged over the last 12 months.

PitchBook rolls its 10-year measurement window forward each year, and its underlying dataset also expanded significantly. The 2025 ranking analyzed more than 173,000 VC-backed founders while this year’s edition draws from the educational histories of more than 222,000. So year-over-year founder counts aren’t an apples-to-apples measure of new startup creation.

The table below shows the top 50 programs for MBA founders.

PitchBook 2026: MBA Founders
2026 Rank
University
Founder Count
Company Count
Capital Raised
Change vs. 2025
1 Harvard University 2,444 2,235 $153.5B –
2 Stanford University 1,504 1,359 $96.8B –
3 University of Pennsylvania 1,437 1,332 $80.3B –
4 INSEAD 1,112 1,032 $39.6B –
5 Columbia University 1,019 954 $38.7B –
6 Northwestern University 1,015 966 $33.9B –
7 MIT 934 858 $42.6B ⬆ +1
8 University of Chicago 884 823 $29.8B ⬇ –1
9 UC Berkeley 705 650 $27.5B –
10 London Business School 568 528 $16.0B –
11 New York University 546 534 $19.0B ⬆ +1
12 UCLA 530 505 $19.4B ⬇ –1
13 Tel Aviv University 429 410 $13.2B –
14 IE University 388 343 $7.2B ⬆ +1
15 IESE Business School 381 345 $8.5B ⬆ +37
16 Duke University 334 326 $7.6B ⬇ –2
17 HEC Paris 292 277 $7.1B ⬇ –1
18 Babson College 288 265 $6.2B –
19 Cornell University 282 271 $9.4B ⬆ +3
20 University of Texas, Austin 273 246 $4.2B ⬆ +1
21 University of Oxford 263 236 $9.7B ⬇ –4
22 USC 259 252 $23.8B ⬇ –3
23 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 254 246 $7.1B ⬆ +1
24 Indian School of Business (ISB) 240 217 $7.8B ⬇ –4
25 ESADE 233 212 $3.7B –
26 Yale University 225 212 $5.9B ⬇ –3
27 Arizona State University, Tempe 196 190 $6.8B –
28 University of Virginia, Charlottesville 195 187 $7.0B –
29 IIM Calcutta 190 177 $11.1B ⬇ –3
30 Dartmouth College 189 184 $7.0B ⬆ +4
31 CEIBS 175 170 $11.4B ⬆ +1
32 Tsinghua University 171 167 $26.3B ⬇ –3
33 Carnegie Mellon University 165 153 $8.1B ⬇ –3
34 IIM Bangalore 163 153 $4.6B ⬇ –3
35 Pepperdine University 154 147 $3.9B ⬇ –3
36 UNC Chapel Hill 146 144 $5.1B ⬆ +2
37 Getulio Vargas Foundation 144 140 $1.5B ⬇ –2
38 University of Washington, Seattle 134 126 $4.2B ⬇ –1
39 University of Toronto 132 127 $4.0B ⬇ –3
40 University of Cambridge 127 115 $2.9B ⬆ +2
41 York University 122 118 $1.3B –
T42 Western University 121 117 $3.0B ⬆ +8
T42 Santa Clara University 121 119 $6.1B ⬆ +5
44 Boston University 120 119 $3.1B ⬇ –4
45 Georgetown University 117 109 $4.7B ⬇ –6
46 Indiana University, Bloomington 115 113 $2.6B ⬆ +3
47 Peking University 114 114 $7.7B ⬇ –3
48 ESSEC Business School 113 109 $3.5B ⬇ –6
49 University of Minnesota, Twin Cities 107 104 $6.4B ⬇ –4
50 Vanderbilt University 104 99 $4.6B ⬆ +1