🚀 Claremont’s Most Successful Startups

A closer look at the Claremont-founded startups that have exited or reached a valuation of ≥ $500M

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For the past year+ now, we’ve been shouting from the rooftops with Between the Lines about all the impressive success the Claremont startup and technology ecosystem has had. Much to our chagrin, and despite the success of Claremont founders and technologists, the Claremont scene has historically still been slept on when it comes to entrepreneurship, but we’ve done our best to change the narrative. As one of the many pieces of recent evidence for the growing Claremont startup ecosystem, we recently shared how the Claremont Colleges ranked against other elite universities when it comes to raising venture dollars for startups:

Despite having a combined enrollment size of roughly 6,300 students, The Claremont Colleges alumni entrepreneurs still raised over $46B in the past decade amongst 315 founders. Even better, when you attempt to control for university size and look at capital raised per founder, The Claremont Colleges rank 2nd in the world and 1st in U.S. universities with an average of over $145M raised per founder. 315 entrepreneurs, 292 companies, $46B raised, and $145M raised on average per Claremont founder…not a bad decade for The Claremont Colleges.

But, as many know, just raising venture dollars does not directly correlate to actual startup success. Term sheets, venture dollars raised, and paper mark-ups don’t mean as much (especially to investors) if the founders and companies aren’t able to execute on their vision, continue to grow, and eventually return $s to their investors. Raising money is only a piece of the journey.

In order to continue to help paint the full picture of Claremont's success, however, we examined historical data on the most successful Claremont-founded companies and founders that have done far more than just raise money. For this analysis, we only focused on Claremont-founded companies with a significant liquidity event (either an IPO or acquisition) of ≥ $500M and those on a current break-out trajectory with a private valuation estimate of ≥ $500M — we refer to these companies as “Winners.”

We found 47 of these Claremont-founded Winners — 22 have already exited for ≥ $500M, and another 25 are still private with estimated valuations of ≥ $500M (16 of these are unicorns). Most of these companies were in either Biotech, Healthcare, Security/Infrastructure/DevOps, or E-Commerce, and over 60% of these companies had a B2B business model as their main source of revenue.

In case you need a refresher on Claremont’s impressive Biotech ecosystem, check out some of our past findings on the space.

Of these 47 companies, 34 were founded just in the last decade.

Between the 2010 and 2020 vintage years, there were an average of 3+ eventual Winners founded each year, and 4.6% of all the Claremont-founded startups that we’ve tracked since 2010 have either already exited for ≥ $500M or are currently valued at ≥ $500M.

So far, the most impressive vintage years for Claremont have been 2014 and 2017, with nine and six Winners founded during those years, respectively.

The combined exit value + current estimated private valuation value of all of these Claremont Winners is over $85B — ~$36B coming from companies that have already exited and another ~$50B in estimated valuations from private companies.

Notwithstanding the recent tech bubble in private and public market valuations, in general, we expect the number of winners per year to increase, especially for the more recent vintage years, considering that it typically takes at least ~5 years to build a business worth > $500M.

Unsurprisingly, given the college’s geographic location, San Francisco and the LA area are where the bulk of these massive companies have been built, but ~40% of these winners were still built outside of those two hubs.

Thirty-nine was also the average age for these Claremont founders at the time of founding their respective companies.

Clearly, Claremont’s startup success extends past just founding companies and raising capital — many of these Claremont-founded startups have become massive businesses impacting the world around us.

We also know that StoryHouse’s existence in cultivating this ecosystem will continue to impact the number and quality of companies founded by Claremont entrepreneurs. Already, we are responsible for 13 Claremont investments, dozens of placements of Claremont talent at top technology companies and startups, co-founder connections to venture-backed companies, and founder connections to venture capital firms. Our newsletter is also widely read by students and young alumni who will be more inclined to start companies in light of the numerous stories we shine a spotlight on. In short…

It’s never been a better time to be a Claremont founder.

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