About
01The authors
Daniel Blaseg
Daniel Blaseg is Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at Esade Business School (Universitat Ramon Llull) in Barcelona. His research sits at the intersection of entrepreneurship, finance, and marketing, focusing on how new ventures attract early support and how investors identify the most promising ones, often using large-scale web data, field experiments, and the quantification of unstructured data. His work has appeared in leading journals including Marketing Science, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, on topics from equity crowdfunding and initial coin offerings to the influence of well-known business angels on venture performance. He earned his PhD in quantitative marketing from Goethe University Frankfurt (2019) and holds master’s degrees in law and in finance; before academia he advised on venture capital transactions and startup acquisitions and co-founded several startups as CFO. His research has earned more than a dozen research and best-paper awards, including the Roman Herzog Research Prize, the Wolfgang Ritter Prize for Outstanding Research in Management, and the BAI Science Prize in Alternative Investments; in 2026 he was named one of Poets&Quants’ Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors.
Alen Karagić Calle
Alen Karagić Calle is the ranking’s co-author and led much of its data collection and engineering during his time as a visiting researcher at Esade Business School. He holds an M.Sc. in technology management from the University of Stuttgart and a B.Eng. in industrial engineering, and his background combines research roles at Fraunhofer IPA and the University of Stuttgart with engineering and strategy-consulting experience in industry; he now works in strategy consulting at KPMG.
02What this ranking is
Venture capital is a small industry with outsized influence: a relatively small number of investors shape which startups get funded, and with that, much of what eventually gets built across the European economy. Where those people studied is a meaningful, and rarely measured, signal of an institution’s reach into the sector.
Where investors studied is not cosmetic. In recent research on VC financing, about a third of deals involve a founder and an investor from the same university, and a shared alma mater is associated with a greater chance of investment and larger funding rounds, an effect the authors attribute to better information flow rather than favoritism. A ranking of where VC professionals studied is, in that light, a map of where these networks and the access they confer are concentrated, not only of which institutions carry the most prestige.
Most university rankings rest on surveys, reputation, and perceived prestige. This one is built the other way round, entirely from observed data: we define the universe of European VC firms, identify the professionals who actually work at them, recover where they studied, and count distinct alumni per institution. The result is a transparent, reproducible measure of educational footprint in European venture capital, rather than an opinion poll.
The site publishes five views (Overall, Bachelor, Master, MBA, and PhD), each ranked by the absolute number of VC professionals connected to an institution. On the Overall view you can also bring in size context, student numbers and, where available, annual budget, and re-sort to see which institutions produce the most VC professionals per student or per €100m of budget. A separate comparison view places the ranking side by side with two external references: the Redstone University Startup Index and PitchBook’s European university rankings.
Read it as one lens, not a verdict. It measures a specific thing, how many people now working in European VC studied where, and it depends on the coverage of its sources. It is not a measure of teaching quality, nor of how good a school is for becoming a founder, nor of outcomes per graduate.
03An academic project
The European VC University Ranking is a non-commercial academic research project. It grew out of ongoing research on entrepreneurial finance, and in particular a simple question: where do the people who allocate early-stage capital actually come from, and what does that say about the pipelines feeding the industry?
Related research: Garfinkel, J. A., Mayer, E. J., Strebulaev, I. A., & Yimfor, E. (2025). Alumni Networks in Venture Capital Financing. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.
The ranking is based entirely on publicly available data and depends on the coverage and accuracy of those sources. Parts of the pipeline are automated and, despite documented corrections and spot checks, individual errors cannot be excluded. We therefore publish the method in full so the findings can be interpreted, reproduced, and challenged on their merits. The complete method, including inclusion rules, counting rules, thresholds, and limitations, is set out on the Methodology page.
How to cite: Blaseg, D., & Karagić Calle, A. (2026). European VC University Ranking. Esade Business School.