India's brain gain: 40 Indian univ alumni join US unicorn founders club

US startup unicorn founders who studied in India, Israel, and Canada compete for top hon-ours among 74 non-US universities, each prod-ucing at least one unicorn founder in the US.

Israeli universities lead the pack with 42 unicorn founders from five institutions, followed closely by India, with 40 founders from eight universities. Canada follows with 37 founders from six universities, while the UK has 25 founders from six universities. China has seven founders, all from Tsinghua University.
 

The research, released in September, was conducted by Ilya Strebulaev, a professor at Stanford, with support from the Stanford Graduate School of Business Venture Capital Initiative. The study examined 531 US unicorns (from 1997 to 2019), identifying the universities where 1,263 founders had studied.
 

Of these, 266 (21 per cent) founders completed their education at non-US universities, and the study identified 74 such institutions.

Tel Aviv University tops the list, producing 16 unicorn founders in the US. This is followed by Technion — Israel Institute of Technology and the University of Waterloo in Canada, each with 11 founders. IIT Kanpur ranks third with nine founders, while IIT Delhi shares the fourth spot with eight founders, alongside The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Toronto, McGill University, and the University of Oxford.
 

Other Indian universities on the list include IIT Madras, IIT Kharagpur, the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (Pilani), Banaras Hindu University (BHU), and the University of Madras. Globally, INSEAD in Fontainebleau, near Paris, has produced five unicorn founders, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in Brussels has four, and Universidad Complutense Madrid and uKTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm have three each, among others.

The five IITs — Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, and Mumbai — collectively account for 30 unicorn founders in the US, reflecting their strong influence on the US and India’s startup landscape.