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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Rankings are determined based on the total number of venture-backed alumni entrepreneurs since 2015, drawn from PitchBook\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s been so much more change over the past five to 10 years,\u201d said Daniel Charron, continuing professional faculty at the Haas School of Business, who has taught at UC Berkeley since 2003. \u201cMore startups, more change \u2014 and that drives an interest and reflects very strongly on the emphasis that Berkeley has on innovation and entrepreneurship.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs 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\u2019s in the sciences or otherwise,\u201d Charron said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe great thing that is underpinning the wave of innovation entrepreneurship at Berkeley is that we are still producing fantastic engineers, fantastic scientists,\u201d Charron said. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the fourth consecutive year, UC Berkeley ranked first in the total number of venture-backed companies founded by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":453522,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[179188,179187,175077,30747,29221,17162,143,145,144,23174,202,149,26781,30849,5987],"class_list":["post-453521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-cornell","tag-daniel-charron","tag-darren-cooke","tag-doordash","tag-harvard","tag-mit","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-pitchbook","tag-stanford","tag-uc-berkeley","tag-university-of-michigan","tag-university-of-waterloo","tag-waymo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453521\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/453522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}