IIT alumni among top unicorn founders in US, says study

New Delhi, April 30

A number of alumni of India’s premier engineering institutes — the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) — are among the top non-USA unicorn founders in the USA, reveals a study. Unicorn is a start-up that is valued at one billion dollar or more. The number of founders of unicorns from IIT, finds the study, is sizeable when compared with any other premier business school in the world, including the University of Oxford and INSEAD.

The study has been conducted by Illya Strebulaev, who is a finance professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, USA.

According to the professor, who is also the founder of the Venture Capital Initiative at Stanford, nine founders of unicorns in the USA are alumni of IIT-Kanpur alone. The study, titled ‘Contribution of Non-US Universities to US Innovation’, revealed that IIT- Delhi, like Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of Oxford, University of Toronto, and McGill University, has produced eight unicorn founders each.

It is Tel Aviv University which is a leader in having produced unicorn founders, with 16 having studied there. The University of Waterloo and Technion Israel Institute of Technology follow with 11 unicorn founders each.