Which MBA startups attracted the most outside investment over the last five years? P&Q asked the world’s best MBA programs for startups founded between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2024.
While some MBA founders are chasing unicorns (and some catching them), an increasing number are chasing solutions to real-world problems.
Take FarmRaise, launched by Stanford MBA Jayce Hafner, a one-stop shop for grants and loans for farmers to scale ag profitability and sustainability. Or HOPO Therapeutics, co-founded by UC Berkeley Haas MBA/MPH student Hannah Weber, which is developing the first oral therapy for heavy-metal poisoning and recently secured a BARDA contract worth up to $226 million.
Jayce Hafner, Stanford GSB MBA and CEO of FarmRaise, is one of several MBA founders pursuing impact through their business ventures.
And then there’s Mantel. The startup, founded by MIT Sloan MBA and chemical engineer Cameron Halliday, is taking on one of climate tech’s toughest challenges: making carbon capture cheap enough to scale. Mantel is developing high-temperature, liquid-phase carbon capture systems built on molten borate salts that can directly trap CO₂ from furnaces, boilers, and kilns.
“Carbon capture has failed to meet its promise, fundamentally, because it’s expensive,” Halliday, Mantel CEO, told Engine Ventures.
“With our technology, we can drive the cost down by half, making carbon capture cost-effective for even the hardest-to-decarbonize sectors.”
The company raised $30 million in Series A funding in September 2024, led by Shell Ventures and Eni Next, to move from the lab to an industrial pilot. Mantel is a resident at The Engine, a deep-tech accelerator spun out of MIT.
Halliday earned both his MBA and his Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 2022 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a Breakthrough Energy Innovator Fellow, a program created by Bill Gates’ climate fund to support breakthrough technologies with global impact.
P&Q’S TOP MBA STARTUPS OF 2025
Today, Poets&Quants presents the 100 highest-funded startups of 2025, a list we have published since 2014. To compile it, we use a single metric that’s easy to compare across industries and regions: how much outside funding startups have raised in the past five years. (Here’s a look back at 2024’s list.)
We asked the world’s best MBA programs for startups founded between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2024. To qualify, startups must have at least one MBA founder in that same timeframe. Numbers verified at the time of reporting were used to compile the list.
The top two startups for 2024 flipped places for 2025: Capchase, co-founded by Class of 2020 INSEAD MBA Luis Basagoiti Marqués, has raised a whopping $1.1 billion, according to Crunchbase, since it was founded in 2020. It was named in Forbes’ 2023 list of Next Billion-Dollar Startups.
That’s just half of what the No. 1 startup on the list raised. Tamara, co-founded by London Business School alum Abdulmohsen Al Babtain (MBA ‘20), raised $2.4 billion since its 2020 launch. That’s $1.4 billion more than the $955.6 million it had posted this time last year when it debuted at No. 2 on our list. The buy-now, pay-later fintech claims to be Saudi Arabia’s first fintech unicorn.
TOTAL FUNDING OF ALMOST $7 BILLION
Altogether, the 100 highest-funded startups raised $7.56 billion, supercharged by the $3.5 billion raised by the top two companies. That’s higher than the $7 billion raised by 2024’s 100 startups on the list, but still well below 2023’s highwater mark of $9.2 billion.
Since 2015, an MBA startup from Stanford Graduate School of Business has topped the highest-funded list 5 out of 11 times. But, the Silicon Valley darling has missed the top four straight years, going all the way back to 2021 when Divvy Homes had raised $299.04 million since its founding.
INSEAD startups posted a three-year streak at the top – twice with grocery delivery startup Gorillas and with Capchase – before London Business School knocked it out of No. 1.
NEXT PAGE: Which B-schools have the most MBA startups? + Top Female Founders