The University of Pennsylvania continues to be a powerhouse for startups, ranking among the top schools in the world for producing future founders.
That's according to new data from Pitchbook, which annually ranks the top schools globally by the number of founders they have produced and how much funding they have gone on to raise.
Penn took top spots in all three of this year's categories, which look at the number of founders and companies a school has produced, as well as capital raised, by undergraduate, graduate and MBA alums. The West Philadelphia Ivy League institution ranked No. 3 for MBAs, No. 4 for undergraduates and No. 6 for graduates.
Only two other institutions, Stanford University and Harvard University, took spots among the top six in each category this year.
Former Quakers have raised $147.7 billion in total, according to Pitchbook. That includes 1,197 undergraduates who went on to raise $52.9 billion, 1,740 graduate program alums who have raised $54.6 billion and 1,147 Penn MBAs that have raised $40.2 billion.
Penn's ranking for graduate alums who have gone on to launch startups jumped nine spots from No. 15 last year, while it maintained its same standings for both undergraduate and MBA entrepreneurs.
The Philadelphia institution's culture of fostering entrepreneurship has picked up since the turn of the century. It has produced founders like Elon Musk, who after graduating from the school in 1997 went on to launch Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Co., among other ventures. One of the school's most prominent alums, Musk's roles in founding OpenAI and xAI account for $16.4 billion, or 29%, of the venture capital raised by Penn undergraduate alums, according to Pitchbook.
For graduate and MBA programs, PhonePe led the way with $2.3 billion in funding raised. The India-based digital payments and financial services company was founded by 2009 Wharton MBA graduate Sameer Nigam.
As part of its rankings, Pitchbook also looks at what schools produce the most female founders. Penn was No. 3 for MBAs, No. 4 for undergraduates, and No. 6 for graduates. In total, the university has produced 596 female founders who have raised a combined $12.2 billion.
Penn's startup ecosystem has spun out over 100 startups in the past five years alone. The Penn Center for Innovation said in its fiscal 2023 report that over $1.2 billion was raised by Penn-affiliated startups, a record at the school. It also ranked No. 1 nationally among colleges for licensing income for the second year in a row, according to the organization.
Its students are looking for ways to build on that momentum. Two MBA students recently launched a student-run venture fund to invest in startups founded by current Penn students or recent graduates.
Penn was the only Philadelphia-area school to make this year's Pitchbook lists. Outside of the immediate region, Princeton University ranked No. 14 for undergraduate founders, while Penn State University landed at No. 35 and Rutgers University ranked No. 71. All three schools ranked in the bottom half of the list for graduate student founders and were not included on the MBA list.
Based on an analysis of nearly 167,000 VC-backed founders, the University of California, Berkeley, topped the global undergraduate list at No. 1, followed by Stanford and Harvard, respectively. Stanford and Harvard topped the graduate list in that order, while they flipped spots at the top of the MBA rankings.
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