Mapping the WashU Startup Landscape
Startups founded by WashU alumni that have received at least $1M in venture-backed funding
In early February, I became a Campus Partner at Ground Up Ventures — an early-stage venture capital firm investing in pre-seed and seed stage startups in the US and Israel.
As a student at WashU, I wanted to create a way for my fellow students, WashU graduates, and the greater ecosystem to learn more about all of the amazing companies founded by WashU alumni.
So I, along with Lukas Steinbock, a fellow WashU student, decided to create a market map of the startups founded by WashU graduates.
How We Did It
To gather the data, Lukas and I looked through Crunchbase to find all of the startups founded by WashU alumni that have received at least $1M of venture-backed funding since 2015 and are still private companies. This led us to find 84 startups matching the criteria, 17 of which are headquartered in St. Louis.
Given the criterion, this list does not include some former startups, now major exited companies founded by WashU alumni such as:
- Square (Jim McKelvey)
- Salesforce (Dave Moellenhoff)
- JioSaavn (Rishi Malhotra; $110M in funding before being acquired by Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited in Dec 2018)
- Wombat Security Technologies (Lorrie Cranor; Acquired by Proofpoint for $225M in Feb 2018)
- Skyport Systems (Will Eatherton; $67M in funding before being acquired by Cisco in Jan 2018)
- OpenDNS (David Ulevitch; Acquired by Cisco for $635M in June 2015)
- Palo Alto Networks (Fengmin Gong)
This map includes some pretty amazing companies from a variety of industries. FAIR (raised $1.5B), OpenDoor (raised $1.3B), and Illumio (raised $332.5M) lead the pack in terms of the most funding, all three of these companies attaining unicorn status, per Crunchbase.
WashU Students: Feel free to reach out to these founders/companies for job and internship opportunities.
Some notable investors leading the last round of funding for these 25 startups include SoftBank, IVP, NEA, General Atlantic, Menlo Ventures, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Norwest Ventures, and Innovation Endeavors, among others.
Key Takeaways:
- Location: The three most popular headquarter locations for WashU alumni founded companies are: St. Louis (~20%), San Francisco (~19%), and New York (~9.5%)
- Sectors: The most common sector for WashU founded startups is Healthcare (~17.8%). This is no surprise given the strength of the Washington University School of Medicine and WashU’s Pre-Med program. FinTech and Biotechnology are the next most popular sectors (each with ~ 10.7%), also signifying WashU’s strengths in these areas
- Unicorns: As mentioned earlier, three WashU founded startups currently hold unicorn status: FAIR, OpenDoor, and Illumio. Look for a few other companies to join these companies in unicorn status in the next few years. Some companies to keep an eye on (among others): Pear Therapeutics, MasterClass, Salsify, Varsity Tutors, and KeepTruckin
Check out the full list here: Full List
Huge thanks to Jordan Odinsky (Ground Up Ventures) and Lukas Steinbock for their help in putting together this data and market map
*** Please note that some of the funding amounts and last venture deal dates may be slightly off from the actual numbers. Additionally, it is highly possible that the Google Sheet does not include all of the startups that meet our criteria for the list. If either/both of these are the case, please feel free to email me at spirom@wustl.edu or Lukas at lsteinbock@wustl.edu, and we’d be happy to make any corrections**
