A new study from Stanford University ranks Tel Aviv University (TAU) first in Israel and first in the world outside the USA in the number of unicorns (privately held startup companies valued at over US$1 billion) established by its alumni.

According to the study, led by entrepreneurship researcher Professor Ilya Strebulaev of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University is first in the world in the number of unicorns founded by its alumni, and TAU is first outside of the USA with 43 unicorns. The ranking, which counts the total number of unicorns regardless of university size, is based on a dataset of 1,100 startups that have raised over $1 billion from venture capital funds in the USA.

“Professor Strebulaev’s findings prove once again that TAU is Israel’s entrepreneurial university, nurturing more startups — and specifically more unicorns — than any other university in the country,” says Professor Moshe Zviran, Chief Entrepreneurship & Innovation Officer at TAU and former Dean of TAU’s Coller School of Management. “We have attained this status because we serve as a home to the best students in a wide range of disciplines, and also because in recent years, under the leadership and vision of Professor Ariel Porat, President of TAU, we have become proactive in the entrepreneurship and innovation arenas.

“We no longer wait for the ‘magic’ to occur,” Professor Zviran adds. “We incorporate entrepreneurship into the curriculum — in the classic disciplines like Computer Science, Engineering, and Management, but also in the Faculties of Humanities, Social Sciences, Law, and the Arts. In fact, most students at TAU can now include an entrepreneurship cluster as an integral part of their studies for a degree, thereby acquiring tools for establishing their own startups, which in the future may become unicorns.”

The new index joins a long series of entrepreneurship rankings, all of which rank TAU as the leader in producing entrepreneurs outside the USA. In 2022, Pitchbook ranked TAU seventh in the world and first outside the USA in the number of venture-capital-backed startups founded by alumni. Startup Genome also ranked TAU among the leading universities, right after Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and UC Berkeley, and first outside the USA.

“There are many entrepreneurship rankings, each based on different parameters,” Professor Zviran says. “All of them, however, indicate that TAU is the best entrepreneurship incubator in the world outside the USA. We made a strategic decision to position TAU as Israel’s main entrepreneurial university, and proactively buttress our technological and business advantage as a means for producing startups and unicorns. If so far these achievements have been based solely on the outstanding quality of our faculty, students, and curriculum, the focused activities of our Entrepreneurship & Innovation Ecosystem are expected to bring even greater accomplishments.”