Israel's universities produce unicorn founders at one of the highest rates in the world
New research by Stanford professor Ilya Strebulaev shows Israeli institutions dramatically outperform their size in educating founders of U.S. billion-dollar startups.
Israel's universities and military continue to punch above their weight in producing billion-dollar startup founders, according to new research by Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Ilya Strebulaev.
The latest analysis, based on more than 1,700 U.S. venture-backed unicorns and over 4,300 founders, finds that Israel stands out not because of its size, but because of the extraordinary concentration of entrepreneurs emerging from its universities and institutions. While countries such as India, the United Kingdom and Canada produce larger absolute numbers of founders, Israel's universities appear disproportionately represented among the people building America's most valuable startups.
Strebulaev's research examined 1,751 U.S. venture-backed unicorns, private startups valued at more than $1 billion, and compared them with a matched sample of venture-backed companies that never reached unicorn status, allowing it to distinguish genuine patterns from simple scale effects.
The findings underscore Israel's longstanding role in the global technology ecosystem, where entrepreneurial talent often flows from universities and military service into Silicon Valley rather than remaining confined to the domestic market.
Nearly 18% of unicorn founders earned their undergraduate degree outside the United States, spanning 336 universities across 61 countries. At the company level, 28.8% of U.S. unicorns have at least one founder educated abroad.
Among those foreign universities, Israeli institutions feature prominently. Eight of the top 25 non-U.S. universities ranked by the number of unicorn founders are Israeli.
Across all degree types, Tel Aviv University produced 54 founders of U.S. unicorns, while the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem each educated 36. Those figures place Israel alongside countries with populations many times larger.
But raw numbers only tell part of the story.
To account for university size, Strebulaev also measured the likelihood that graduates of a given institution would go on to found a unicorn compared with venture-backed founders generally.
On that measure, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev ranks among the world's elite. Its graduates are 6.6 times more likely to become unicorn founders than venture-backed founders overall, placing it behind only China's Tsinghua University and France's INSEAD among non-U.S. institutions.
Overall, six Israeli universities appear among the top 18 global institutions ranked by this "odds ratio," a remarkable concentration for a country of roughly 10 million people.
Israel also appears in another category associated with future unicorn founders: previous employers.
Among organizations whose alumni are significantly overrepresented among unicorn founders, the Israel Defense Forces joins companies such as Google, Meta and Microsoft as statistically significant breeding grounds for future entrepreneurs.
The strongest effect belongs to OpenAI, whose former employees are nearly 15 times more likely than expected to become unicorn founders. Other companies with particularly strong entrepreneurial alumni include Flagship Pioneering, Uber, PayPal and Palantir.
