London Business School Lands £25M Gift, Matching Its Largest Since 2013

The London Business School announced today a £25 million gift, one of the largest in school history, to rename its North Building at Sussex Place and fund scholarships to attract top MBA talent from around the world.

The gift from the David and Molly Pyott Foundation and David and Molly Pyott matches Idan Ofer’s landmark gift in 2013. It is the second £25 million gift LBS has received since Sergei Guriev became dean in fall 2024.

“It’s not about these two £25m gifts, which are the biggest the school has received,” Guriev tells Poets&Quants.

“It’s a vote of confidence of the community to support what the school can achieve in the coming years. I can only see how much responsibility I have [to] actually deliver on this confidence. It’s not just the buildings…alumni feel the connection.”

HEIGHTENED COMPETITION FOR TOP GLOBAL TALENT

The gift comes as elite business schools continue to compete aggressively for MBA talent. To be spent over the next five years as LBS sees fit, the Pyotts’ donation will go toward recruiting top students and faculty.

“Because I live in the US, I’m keenly aware of the fierce talent competition [among] the best institutions,” says David Pyott. “This is a way of making sure we get the best and brightest.”

That edge will serve LBS well at a time when the even the highest-ranked international business schools are under pressure from their deep-pocketed U.S. rivals – which often have larger endowments and more extensive financial aid.

Guriev is keenly aware of the competition. “In this peer group we’re by far the youngest school, with the next oldest being INSEAD. The average US school is more than 100 years old. That means more alumni and more scholarship recipients giving back,” he says.

But he’s also bullish on recruitment, noting “it’s a great opportunity to bring people to London.”

This year already, LBS hired 10 junior faculty from the US, up from three the year before, he says.

GIFT TO EXPAND LBS SCHOLARSHIPS 

This latest donation comes as part of a broader fundraising surge under Guriev.

LBS has raised nearly £90 million during the dean’s tenure, including two gifts of £25 million, one gift of £15 million, one gift of £5 million, and several more of £1 million or more. The latest announcement brings the school’s Forever Forward campaign to more than £170 million raised toward its £200 million target.

“The original deadline…is now completely within reach,” says Guriev. He adds this was “not as easy to imagine a year ago” when it had reached £70-80m of its current goal.

In its previous £100m funding round in 2013, Idan Ofer’s £25 million gift to LBS was described as the largest single donation to a UK business school. That gift helped fund the remodel of LBS’s Old Marylebone Town Hall buildings, later renamed the Sammy Ofer Centre.

At the time, then-dean Sir Andrew Likierman framed the gift as a turning point for the school’s ambitions, including its need to expand teaching space and double the number of scholarships to attract top students.

A MAJOR ALUMNUS

The recent £25m gift will also leave a physical mark on LBS. Its North Building, which overlooks Regent’s Park, will be renamed the David and Molly Pyott Building.

David Pyott is one of LBS’s most prominent alumni. A graduate of the MSc13 class of 1980, he is the first alumnus to serve as chair of the school’s Governing Body – and has just been reappointed for another term.

He was CEO of Allergan from 1998 to 2015, leading the global pharmaceutical company through a period of significant growth and innovation. He received the Director of the Year Award from the National Association of Corporate Directors in 2011 and currently sits on the boards of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and Tarsus Pharmaceuticals. He is also a trustee and member of the Executive Committee of the California Institute of Technology.

“London Business School has long held a special place for us,” David and Molly Pyott said in a statement. “We have seen firsthand how LBS shapes careers and transforms lives, exactly as it did for David. We believe deeply that our gift will help LBS to unlock opportunities and achieve its full potential.”

The Pyott Building will extend the footprint of its Executive Education programs, an area in which the school has long been a global player. LBS says the building will help strengthen its work developing business leaders throughout their careers.

The school has also been expanding beyond its London base. In addition to its main campus in the city and its long-standing Dubai campus, LBS officially opened an Executive Education office in Riyadh’s historic Diriyah district in late 2025, deepening its presence in the Middle East.

THE BIGGEST B-SCHOOL GIFTS

Pyott’s gift matches several £25 million gifts to LBS over the last decade or so – a respectable figure for UK and even European business schools.

France’s INSEAD announced two of the largest in recent years, including a €40 million gift from André and Rosalie Hoffmann in 2018 to establish the Hoffmann Global Institute for Business and Society, followed by a €60 million anonymous alumni gift in 2020, the largest in INSEAD’s history.

In 2024, HEC Paris announced it had raised €213 Million through its Impact Tomorrow Campaign from about 6,000 alumni and other donors. While not a single gift, it doubled the school’s previous fundraising effort from 2013.

Still, these gifts still pale in comparison to the gifts at U.S. business schools, where endowments, fundraising, and alumni donations are baked into the system.

In June, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, landed a $130 million commitment from alumni Dee and Jimmy Haslam, with $100 million of it headed directly to the College of Business.

The benchmark, though, is still David Booth’s 2008 gift to the University of Chicago, valued at $300 million, which renamed the school Chicago Booth and was described by the school as the largest gift ever given to any business school in the world. Stephen Ross has donated $250 million to Michigan’s business school since 2004.

U.S. business schools have a more established tradition of naming schools, buildings, centers, and programs through major gifts. Those gifts often become permanent parts of a school’s identity. Booth, Ross, Stern, and Kellogg – all named for large donors – are now global brands.

Since 2008, 15 donors have given gifts to U.S. business schools of $100 million or more. Another 12 have given $50 million or more.

SCHOOL	AMOUNT	DONOR	YEAR
Chicago’s Booth School of Business	$300 million	David Booth	2008
Michigan’s Ross School of Business	$250 million	Stephen Ross	2004, 2013, 2017
University of Hawai’i-Mānoa Shidler College of Business	$228 million	Jay H. Shidler	2014, 2017
University of Illinois’s Gies College of Business	$150 million	Larry Gies	2017
Cornell’s SC Johnson College of Business	$150 million	H. Fisk Johnson	2017
Stanford Graduate School of Business	$150 million	Robert & Dorothy King	2011
UCLA Anderson School of Management	$142 million	John & Marion Anderson	1987, 2011, 2015
Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business	$122 million	David Tepper	2004, 2013
Stanford Graduate School of Business	$105 million	Philip Knight	2006
Tennessee Haslam College of Business	$100 million	Dee & Jimmy Haslam	2026
Yale School of Management	$100 million	Eli & Edythe Broad	2019
UC-San Diego Rady School of Management	$100 million	Ernest Rady	2015
Florida State College of Business	$100 million	Jim Moran	2015
Columbia Business School	$100 million	Ronald Perelman	2013
Columbia Business School	$100 million	Henry Kravis	2010

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