We researched the founders of the 1,974 most-funded startups we track, 4,339 people in all. Here is what they have in common: where they come from, how many are women, where they studied, and where they worked before they built the thing. Patterns, not destiny.
Men and women
Share of founders by gender across the dataset.
Men 95%
5%
■ 4,099 men ■ 238 women. The startup founder gender gap, in our data.
Where they are from
Top origin countries (note: weighted by where EquityFlow tracks deals).
United States828
India670
Germany519
United Kingdom317
France254
Israel179
China129
Brazil119
Netherlands99
Sweden98
unknown82
Canada67
Spain63
Denmark60
South Korea56
Where they studied
The schools that show up most on founder CVs.
Stanford University93
Harvard University49
Massachusetts Institute of Technology49
University of Oxford47
Harvard Business School36
University of Cambridge34
IIT Bombay31
IIT Delhi27
Technical University of Munich26
INSEAD25
Imperial College London22
Tel Aviv University19
Carnegie Mellon University19
University of California, Berkeley18
Ecole Polytechnique18
London School of Economics17
Princeton University17
IIT Kharagpur17
University of Pennsylvania17
UC Berkeley16
Where they worked before
The companies founders most often came from. Consulting, big tech and finance dominate the pipeline.
McKinsey & Company85
Google72
Microsoft44
Goldman Sachs40
Boston Consulting Group33
Deutsche Bank28
Morgan Stanley26
Apple22
Stanford University22
Bain & Company21
Uber21
Facebook20
SpaceX20
Flipkart20
Amazon19
OpenAI19
MIT19
Tesla18
Google DeepMind17
Google Brain16
Method: we researched the founders of the top startups by funding raised that we track, capturing gender, origin, education and prior roles from public sources. Figures are a sample of the funded-startup world, not the whole of it, and skew toward the regions and sectors we cover. Free to use with attribution to EquityFlow.