Technion-Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) has been Top 20 among global universities for the number of venture-funded startups its undergraduate alumni have founded for a 5th consecutive year, according to data from the 2023 PitchBook university ranking released recently.

Pitchbook, a data provider for private and public equity markets, annually ranks the world's best universities for cultivating startup founders. The rankings, based on an analysis of more than 150,000 VC-backed founders, compare schools by tallying up the number of alumni entrepreneurs who have raised venture capital in the last decade.

Five Israeli universities were listed in the top half of PitchBook's 2023 ranking of the 100 undergraduate programs and the Technion ranked in 16th place.

According to the data, the undergraduate and graduate programs at the Technion have created 851 founders with 717 companies, including Cloud security startup Wiz. The alumni went on to raise a total of 22.4 billion dollars in the last decade.

Israel is rich in its immeasurable scientific advances, and also known as the world's "Startup Nation". Among which, the Technion's graduates represent more than half of Israel's engineers. The Technion, home to four Nobel laureates, has made an impact in all fields of applied science and technology, including electronics, information technology, water management, nanotechnology, life sciences and chemistry, clean-tech, materials engineering, and aerospace engineering.

Guangdong Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (GTIIT), the China campus of the Technion, practices the same academic standards and undergraduate studies as that in the Haifa campus. From the strong base, GTIIT's ecosystem of support for innovative faculty and students to produce quality companies or start their own business had accelerated dramatically in recent years.

To encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, all students are required to take a start-up credit course to understand the skills and process of innovation and entrepreneurship. With the help of the experience of the Technion in technology transformation, GTIIT has quickly and effectively established an ecosystem, to encourage the researchers to commercialize their own inventions and output and apply for intellectual property patents, which is becoming the catalyzer and incubator for the new products and startups.

Innovation and entrepreneurship are encouraged in GTIIT campus. Students actively participated in global and national business competitions with their ideas combined with their practice in the laboratories, winning various prizes and awards and GTIIT's first start-up "Shunlu Ecosystem (顺鹿生态)" was founded. The "Innovation Seed" Project, co-launched by the Shantou Listed Companies Development Promotion Association and the Education Foundation of GTIIT, attracted more than 50 projects by the GTIIT faculty and students, with the funding amount exceeding 1 million yuan.

Text/Photos: GTIIT News & Public Affairs