For the second consecutive year, Tel Aviv University (TAU) has been ranked seventh in the world—and the top university outside the United States—for producing entrepreneurs, according to PitchBook’s prestigious 2025 ranking.
The index tracks the universities whose graduates have founded the largest number of startups and raised the most venture capital. TAU now sits alongside elite institutions such as Stanford, Harvard and MIT.
According to PitchBook, TAU graduates have founded 736 companies over the past decade, raising a combined $30 billion. In total, 865 entrepreneurs emerged from the university, including the founders of Lendbuzz, who recently filed for an IPO after raising more than $1 billion, and Next Insurance, which sold this year for more than $2.5 billion.
“The university is proud to continue to be the entrepreneurial university of Israel,” said Professor Moshe Zviran, TAU’s chief entrepreneurship and innovation officer. “The fact that PitchBook ranks us at the top year after year is the best proof of our academic excellence and leadership in creating a generation of entrepreneurs who found companies, raise venture capital and move the Israeli economy forward.”
In a milestone for Israel, the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology entered PitchBook’s global top 10 for the first time. Technion graduates have founded more than 1,000 companies in the past decade, led by around 1,300 entrepreneurs, who together raised more than $43 billion. Of these, some 670 startups were founded by undergraduates alone, raising $26 billion.
Among medium-sized universities (15,000–30,000 students), the Technion ranked first in the Middle East and Asia and fifth worldwide, illustrating the exceptional entrepreneurial rate of its alumni.
“Technion alumni are the main economic engine of the State of Israel and are largely responsible for the creation of Israel’s Startup Nation,” said Technion president Professor Uri Sivan. He highlighted the university’s growing focus on undergraduate entrepreneurship studies, as well as initiatives such as t:hub, its innovation hub, and T3, its commercialization arm connecting researchers with industry.
Globally, the University of California, Berkeley topped the list, followed by Stanford, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT. TAU and the Technion outranked Yale, UCLA, Columbia and Princeton, which placed 12th through 15th.
Other Israeli institutions also made the list. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ranked 30th, Reichman University 47th, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev 52nd and Bar-Ilan University 90th.
Israel was the only country outside the United States with two universities in PitchBook’s top 10.
