63 MBA Grads Raised $15bn In Venture Capital For Their $65bn ‘Unicorn’ startups

Related Articles

• More MBA Students Seeking Entrepreneurial Skills 0 07.May
• Business School Vs. Incubator: An Entrepreneurial Test Drive At Stanford To Find Which Works Best 0 19.Nov
• Stanford to MBAs: Study now, start-up later 0 22.Dec

MBAs from elite schools like Harvard, Stanford and INSEAD have founded 38 “unicorns” — ventures valued above $1 billion — worth $65 billion.

63 MBAs account for 38 (or 24%) of the world’s unicorn start-ups, says new data from NextView Ventures. There are 157 unicorns which have not floated or been acquired, according to the Crunchbase Unicorn Leaderboard.

Entrepreneurs from Harvard Business School founded the most unicorns, 13, which are collectively valued at nearly $26 billion and have banked $5 billion in venture capital. These include GrabTaxi, the Singapore cab-hailing start-up that has raised $680 million, which has an unconfirmed valuation above a billion dollars.

Oscar, health insurance company utilizing big data, has raised around $330 million since its founders graduated from Harvard.

Stanford’s Graduate School of Business is second with seven unicorns, despite its closeness to San Francisco’s start-up and venture capital hotspot, Silicon Valley. Stanford’s nine entrepreneurs have raised $3 billion in investment for their unicorns, valuating them at $10.5 billion.

“There’s an obvious advantage to being at Stanford. In order to get a meeting with a VC, you just drive a few minutes down the road,” says Tom Sabel, associate director of carers at Stanford GSB.

The most noteworthy are Medallia, a Palo Alto-based company that makes customer-feedback software, which raised $255 million, including from Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital, giving it a valuation of $1.2 billion. And Proteus Digital Health, which has backing of $283 million and a valuation of $1.1 billion…