Pitchbook has released its Top 50 Universities for VC-Backed Entrepreneurs report for 2017, with Rhode Island's own Brown University having a strong showing of #17 in a 50-spot rank for undergraduate programs.
For the uninitiated, Pitchbook's ranking tracks the number of founders, their companies, and the amount of money they've earned as they relate to certain schools across the globe. "This data is in fact an important piece of understanding the venture ecosystem(s) as a whole," writes Pitchbook analyst Kyle Stanford. "For instance, there is likely a large correlation between the number of founders a school produces with the overall deal value and company count figures of the region within which that school is located. And, as entrepreneurs work through their companies to exit, eventually they may find themselves making investments from their own funds, which may be based near where they have spent their professional careers."
Back to the stats. In Brown's case, "strong showing" may be underselling it a bit. The university boasts 426 VC-backed entrepreneurs, 388 companies, and nearly $7.6 billion in capital earned from said companies, namely GO-JEK, Acerta Pharma, Funding Circle, MongoDB, and Betterment. Overall, this brings Brown up one spot since last year's ranking.
And that's not all. Brown ranks #10 out of the 20 top universities with female founders (up three spots since last year's count), with 64 entrepreneurs at 63 companies with $539 million in capital. Highest earners include Revolution Foods, CommonBond, True Fit, Away, and Analyte Health.
Overall, Brown came in 15th for undergraduate program sector breakdowns. Of its 388 companies, the majority were either related to software (163); sorted into an "other" industrial category (63), or were health care services/supplies systems-related (44).
