UC Berkeley ranked first by Pitchbook for undergraduate alumni entrepreneurship and female founders | Campus

For the fourth consecutive year, UC Berkeley ranked first in the total number of venture-backed companies founded by undergraduate alumni, according to worldwide college rankings released by PitchBook on Tuesday.

PitchBook ranks universities every year on entrepreneurship, with separate rankings for undergraduate, graduate and Master of Business Administration programs. The company also ranks universities for female startup founders, where UC Berkeley also came in first this year for female undergraduate alumni.

According to PitchBook, UC Berkeley undergraduate alumni have raised $139.4 billion in capital, with 2,155 companies founded. Startups founded or co-founded by UC Berkeley alumni include Waymo and Doordash.

Rankings are determined based on the total number of venture-backed alumni entrepreneurs since 2015, drawn from PitchBook’s database of over 222,000 founders. Multiple rounds of startup funding are considered, from the seed round, typically the earliest institutional round of funding received by a startup, to later-stage funding rounds.

Reflecting on the factors that contribute to the startup culture at UC Berkeley, Chief Innovation & Entrepreneurship Officer Darren Cooke highlighted how entrepreneurship has become increasingly important for incoming students.

“There’s been so much more change over the past five to 10 years,” said Daniel Charron, continuing professional faculty at the Haas School of Business, who has taught at UC Berkeley since 2003. “More startups, more change — and that drives an interest and reflects very strongly on the emphasis that Berkeley has on innovation and entrepreneurship.”

The number of companies founded by alumni from the graduate and MBA programs at UC Berkeley also ranked in the top 10, at fourth and ninth respectively. In the undergraduate program category, the next four highest-ranked universities are Stanford, Harvard, Cornell and MIT.

The five universities ranked below UC Berkeley are all private institutions. These are followed by the University of Waterloo and the University of Michigan, at seventh and eighth place respectively, both of which are public institutions.

“As a public institution, (UC Berkeley) has done a fantastic job getting the resources to the places that can accelerate (and) motivate entrepreneurs or innovators, whether that’s in the sciences or otherwise,” Charron said.

He also noted that increasing numbers of external investors have been interested in supporting UC Berkeley entrepreneurs over the last 10 years, and that exposure to entrepreneurship was a large contributor to increasing student motivation for innovation.

“The great thing that is underpinning the wave of innovation entrepreneurship at Berkeley is that we are still producing fantastic engineers, fantastic scientists,” Charron said. “The core academic institution is still really strong. And that, combined with the entrepreneurship and innovation focus, I think is really what makes Berkeley a fabulous place to be.”