We researched the founders of the 1,974 most-funded startups we track, 4,729 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%
■ 4,176 men ■ 240 women. The startup founder gender gap, in our data.
Where they are from
Top origin countries (note: weighted by where EquityFlow tracks deals).
United States820
India672
Germany520
United Kingdom320
Unknown311
France260
Israel179
China129
Brazil118
Netherlands99
Sweden99
unknown82
Canada67
Spain64
Denmark60
Where they studied
The schools that show up most on founder CVs.
Stanford University103
Harvard University59
University of Oxford58
Massachusetts Institute of Technology56
Harvard Business School43
University of Cambridge40
Technical University of Munich37
INSEAD33
IIT Bombay31
University of California, Berkeley29
IIT Delhi27
Tel Aviv University26
Cornell University22
University of Pennsylvania22
Imperial College London22
University of Michigan21
Carnegie Mellon University21
Princeton University20
MIT20
Ecole Polytechnique19
Where they worked before
The companies founders most often came from. Consulting, big tech and finance dominate the pipeline.
McKinsey & Company87
Google80
Microsoft50
Goldman Sachs45
Deutsche Bank34
Boston Consulting Group34
OpenAI31
Morgan Stanley28
Flipkart26
Apple25
Facebook24
Amazon24
Stanford University24
Uber23
Bain & Company23
SpaceX21
Google DeepMind20
Meta19
MIT19
Tesla18
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.