More than 800 entrepreneurs holding bachelor’s degrees from Tel Aviv University have established 677 companies and raised a total of $26.5 billion – bringing TAU to seventh place in the world and a first-place ranking outside the United States in the prestigious PitchBook ranking.
Every year, PitchBook, a business data research firm, publishes an annual ranking of the world’s top 100 universities based on the number of alumni entrepreneurs who have founded venture capital-backed companies. Several elite American universities are at the top of the list, including Stanford, UC Berkeley, Harvard, and MIT. Tel Aviv University ranks higher than leading universities such as Yale (tenth place), UCLA (eleventh), and Princeton (twelfth).
The PitchBook ranking notes the following large companies established by TAU alumni: Generate ($3.3B), Fireblocks ($1.2B), Trax ($1.1B), Varo ($992M) and Celsius ($948M). Three more Israeli universities are also included in the list of 100, including the Technion (fifteenth place), Hebrew University (thirty-first) and Ben-Gurion University (forty-fifth).
Prof. Ariel Porat, President of Tel Aviv University: “The credit for this enormous success goes to our alumni, first and foremost, but TAU also does its best to instill a spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation in its students. It is no coincidence that we have a superb Entrepreneurship Center on campus, expected to grow even further in the next few years, and to equip TAU students from the exact sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities with the tools and motivation that are so essential for entrepreneurial endeavors in all areas, both technological and social.”
Prof. Moshe Zviran, Head of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Tel Aviv University: “TAU continues to establish itself as Israel’s main entrepreneurial university and a world leader in producing entrepreneurs who found companies, raise venture capital, and boost Israel’s economy. TAU’s climb to seventh place in the PitchBook rankings is one more indicator of the high quality of our alumni, as well as the contribution of the entrepreneurial ecosystem on campus that proactively promotes this approach among both students and faculty.”