Stanford tops venture list

Stanford University has beaten 5 other universities to come top of a list for its alumni fundraising, according to the inaugural University Entrepreneurship Report.

The Calif.-based University’s alumni raised $4.1bn in venture and angel funding over 203 deals between 2007 and 2011. Harvard University came a close second with $3.8bn over 112 deals. However, excluding Facebook financings, Harvard’s total investment raised for the period falls to $1.8bn. Regardless, the sum was still large enough to beat University of California Berkeley in third place with $1.3bn and 90 deals.

In joint fourth place is New York University and University of Pennsylvania (U Penn), which both raised $1.2bn each over 48 and 46 deals, respectively. MIT came sixth, with $1bn over 60 deals.

In total, the alumni raised $12.6bn of financing across 559 transactions.

In addition, the report covered where the alumni companies are based, and found that Stanford and UC Berkeley did the best job of retaining talent in California, whilst U Penn and Harvard saw significant leakage of alumni leaving the respective university’s home state.

Tech software in 2011 saw the most investment in all but UC Berkeley, with the other 5 universities seeing  64% (Stanford) to 97% (U Penn) of their funding going into software. UC Berkeley by contrast had its funding roughly split between healthcare and industrial sectors.

CB Insights, which compiled the report, also noted the top two venture firms working with each university, which are as follows:

• Stanford – DFJ and Kleiner Perkins
• Harvard – Accel Partners and Google Ventures
• UC, Berkeley – (6 investors tied for first)
• NYU – Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital
• U Penn – MentorTech and Bessemer