Israel's TAU ranks as number one unicorn breeder outside the U.S.
'We achieved this status because we welcome the best students in a wide range of disciplines' says Professor Moshe Zviran from Tel Aviv University
A new study by Stanford University ranked Israel's Tel Aviv University (TAU) as the institution with the most unicorn startups (private companies valued at over $1 billion) established by alumni in the world, excluding the United States.
The American university, Stanford, led the world in the number of unicorns founded by its alumni, in the study conducted by one of its own researchers, Professor Ilya Strebulaev from the Graduate School of Business.
The ranking utilized a dataset of 1,100 startups that have raised more than $1 billion from venture capital funds based in the United States.
“Professor Strebulaev's findings prove once again that Tel Aviv University is Israel's entrepreneurial university, nurturing more startups, and in particular more unicorns, than any other university in the country,” Director of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at TAU, Professor Moshe Zviran, said in a press statement.
"We have achieved this status because we welcome the best students in a wide range of disciplines, and also because in recent years we have become proactive in the spheres of entrepreneurship and innovation," Zviran added.
"Most students can now include entrepreneurship as an integral part of their studies for a degree, acquiring the tools to create their own startups, which in the future could become unicorns," Zviran asserted.
Pitchbook also ranked TAU in 2022 as 1st outside the United States, and 7th in the world, for the number of venture capital-backed startups founded by students. The Genome Startup also ranked the Israeli institution among the top universities, just behind Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Berkley, and 1st outside America.
"We made a strategic decision to position Tel Aviv as Israel's leading entrepreneurial university and proactively strengthen our technological and business advantage as a means of producing startups and unicorns . Until now, these achievements have been based solely on the exceptional quality of our faculty, our students and our program," Zviran concluded.