When people think of Boston, intellect - and maybe accents - probably comes to mind.
Turns out, female entrepreneurs hailing from our local colleges and universities are cleaning up in the venture capital world. A recent report from Pitchbook, a firm focused on VC and PE research, showed just that. Among the top VC-backed females, grads from Harvard, BU and MIT had a firm foothold.
Pitchbook took their VC funding data from August of 2010 to July of 2015 and did some analysis. They broke down information about US colleges and universities, highlighting the ones with the largest number of female founders backed by VCs. Taking it one step further, they pinpointed the schools whose women-led startups have scored the most money in those backings.
To make things clearer, Pitchbook worked with two data pools: female founders coming out of undergrad programs, and those out of MBAs.
For the number of woman-led startups getting funding, Stanford alum took the top spot with 70 companies. Penn and UC Berkley followed with 62 and 57 ventures. However, Harvard and MIT landed in the fourth and fifth slots, producing 48 and 42 VC-funded alumna startups respectively.
When it came to the actual amount of money these startups raised, Boston led the pack. Harvard was the frontrunner and alumna-led companies scored a cumulative $527.7M. Stanford was second, but BU came in third with $315.9M - which is quite the feat since BU had far fewer funded ventures. MIT scored $250.6M, earning a fifth place ranking, just following USC.
Business school data also boasted a big Boston presence. For number of backed startups, HBS was top dog again, producing 90 alumna startups getting capital. MIT took fourth with 35.
Perhaps the most remarkable figure is the total amount of funding HBS alumna raised for their companies. They blew all other schools out of the water with a whopping $1.1997B (to be precise). The only school to come even moderately close to that was Penn. Its $437.4M looks pretty paltry in comparison.
