Jerusalem, 30 December, 2025 (TPS-IL) — A new study from Stanford University has placed Tel Aviv University at the top of a highly competitive global ranking, finding that undergraduate studies at TAU dramatically increase the likelihood of becoming a founder of a billion-dollar startup.
“It is because the university offers a high level of education alongside active encouragement of entrepreneurial initiatives. We do not only provide knowledge. We encourage students to experience the world of Entrepreneurship during their studies, and that is one of the reasons for this success,” Prof. Moshe Zviran, Tel Aviv University’s Chief Entrepreneurship and Innovation Officer, told The Press Service of Israel.
A unicorn refers to a privately held startup company valued at $1 billion or more. The term was coined in 2013 by U.S. venture capitalist Aileen Lee to emphasize how rare such companies once were — like the mythical creature.
According to the research, published last week by Prof. Ilya Strebulaev of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, entrepreneurs who completed their undergraduate degrees at Tel Aviv University are 260 percent more likely to go on to found a unicorn company than comparable founders who received venture capital funding but did not attend the institution. The figure is the highest recorded among all universities examined in the study, including elite American institutions such as MIT, Stanford, and Yale.
The research focused on the relationship between academic background and entrepreneurial outcomes among founders of venture capital-backed companies. Strebulaev analyzed data from 2,781 founders of U.S.-based unicorn companies, defined as privately held startups valued at over one billion dollars, and compared them to a control group of 2,188 founders of venture capital-backed firms that did not reach unicorn status. To ensure a fair comparison, the groups were matched according to the year in which each company received its first round of venture capital funding.
Within that framework, Tel Aviv University emerged as a clear outlier. While undergraduate education at MIT was associated with a 90 percent increase in the odds of founding a unicorn, and degrees from Stanford or Yale correlated with a 60 percent increase, TAU’s relative advantage more than doubled those figures. Berkeley and Cornell, both mainstays of the global innovation ecosystem, showed an increase of about 30 percent.
In absolute numbers, American universities still dominate the field. Stanford University ranked first overall, producing 139 unicorn founders, or five percent of the total sample. Tel Aviv University, however, was the only institution outside the United States to appear in the top tier of the ranking. It placed eighth globally in the number of unicorn founders it produced, ahead of several major U.S. universities, while simultaneously leading the list in terms of relative impact.
The study points to a distinctive academic and cultural environment that appears to significantly amplify the likelihood of high-growth outcomes among TAU’s undergraduate alumni, Zviran said. At the same time, he emphasized that institutional advantages are only part of the equation.
“We are not creating something from scratch,” he added. “We are refining and channeling what Israeli students already bring with them.”
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