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09-13-22-wharton-school-liliann-zou
Steinberg-Dietrich Hall, the Wharton School on Sept. 13, 2022. Credit: Liliann Zou

The Wharton School placed in the top six in PitchBook's 2022 list of 100 universities that produce the most startup founders in all four of the list's categories — overall undergraduate, overall graduate, female founders undergraduate, and female founders graduate.

PitchBook is a venture capital, private equity, and mergers and acquisitions database that releases annual college rankings. Schools are ranked for the list based on the number of alumni entrepreneurs who have founded companies that received the first round of venture funding within the last 10 years. 

Penn ranked fifth in the undergraduate category with 1,038 founders, sixth in the graduate category with 1,456 founders, fourth in the undergraduate female category with 172 founders, and fifth in the graduate female category with 205 founders.

The Wharton School consistently produces venture-backed companies and supports students in their entrepreneurial pursuits through different initiatives. For example, Wharton launched Fund for Health in 2021, collaborating with Penn Medicine and the Wharton Social Impact Initiative to invest in health startups. 

Other peer institutions on the list include Stanford University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California at Berkeley, and Columbia University. 

While institutions in the United States make up most of the list, Israeli colleges Tel Aviv University and Technion — Israel Institute of Technology ranked within the top 15 universities for their undergraduate programs. University of Oxford and University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom placed in the top 10 for graduate programs.