The 100 Highest-Funded MBA Startups Of 2026

Looking across Poets&Quants’ lists of the highest-funded MBA startups over the last several years, the problems seem to be getting harder.

More founders are pushing into AI, deep tech, biotech and advanced manufacturing. Rather than looking for market gaps and trying to fill them (though plenty still are), more MBA entrepreneurs are trying to solve big world problems with capabilities that don’t yet exist. Across our 2026 list, founders are going after problems that require laboratories, factories, years of research and enormous amounts of capital.

Take Terradot, a climate startup born out of Stanford research, which is trying to accelerate one of Earth’s natural carbon-removal processes. Founded by Stanford Graduate School of Business MBA Julia Marisa Sekula, the company spreads finely crushed silicate rock across farmland, where rainwater reacts with the rock and converts atmospheric carbon dioxide into forms that can remain stored for thousands of years. The process, known as enhanced rock weathering, compresses a natural cycle that can take millennia into years.

Or there’s Prime Intellect, co-founded by Harvard Business School MBA Jimmy Zheng, which is building infrastructure to train and continuously improve a company’s own AI instead of relying on the handful of frontier AI labs. The company announced a $130 million Series A in July led by Radical Ventures, with participation from Nvidia Ventures, Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital.

And Space Kinetic, co-founded by UC Berkeley Haas School of Business MBA Ryan Sullivan and MEng Scott Ziegler, has raised $63 million and recently landed a $50 million U.S. Space Force award.

P&Q’S TOP MBA STARTUPS OF 2025

Today, Poets&Quants presents the 100 Highest-Funded Startups of 2026, a list we have published since 2014. To compile it, we use a single metric that’s easy to compare across industries and regions: how much outside funding startups have raised over the past five years. (Here’s a look back at 2025’s list.)

We asked the world’s best MBA programs for startups founded between January 1, 2021, and December 31, 2025. To qualify, startups must have at least one MBA founder in that same timeframe. Numbers verified at the time of reporting were used to compile the list.

For the third year in a row, a European MBA gets credit for the highest funded startup.

Poolside, founded by IE Business School‘s Eiso Kant, builds its own AI models and tools for writing, understanding and working with computer code. Its $626 million in funding, verified at the time of reporting, may already look quaint. According to Bloomberg, Nvidia agreed to pay $6 billion to license Poolside’s AI technology and separately invested $1 billion at a $12 billion pre-money valuation. The deal underscores just how quickly the stakes have escalated for companies building their own foundation AI models.

After IE, nine American startup powerhouses finish out the top 10.

Three startups new to our list take the next three spots. No. 2 Vulcan Elements, founded by HBS MBAs John Maslin and Scott Glover, has raised $504.63 million to rebuild the U.S. industrial supply chain for rare-earth magnets.

At No. 3, UCLA Anderson School of Business MBA Alexander Motola helped launch LucyRx, a next-generation pharmacy benefit manager that has attracted more than $500 million in committed capital.

Then there’s Félix at No. 4, a fintech founded by University of Pennsylvania’s The Wharton School MBAs Bernardo García and Manuel Godoy to make sending money home to Latin America as easy as sending a WhatsApp message. Félix has now raised about $299.5 million, including a $200 million Series C announced in September, as it expands into a broader suite of financial products for Latino consumers in the United States.

“The idea was born during our time at Wharton. The MBA program and its resources helped us tremendously in launching the venture,” the founders told Poets&Quants when they were named among the Most Disruptive MBA Startups of 2021.

The founders drew on classmates for feedback, product testing, pitching help, and even early customers. Lessons from Zeke Hernandez’s Global Business class and other entrepreneurship, management, and strategy courses helped shape the idea.

The founders also tapped Wharton’s Venture Lab provided through its VIP-X accelerator, startup competitions, and grants, including awards for Most Innovative Startup and support from Wharton AI for Business. They credit the MBA Fund and Dorm Room Fund for early help.

At No. 5, HOPO Therapeutics maintains its place on our list for the second straight year. The clinical-stage biotech co-founded by Haas MBA/MPH graduate Hannah Weber alongside chemists Rebecca Abergel and Julian Rees. They are developing the first oral treatments for heavy-metal poisoning and radiological exposure.

TOTAL FUNDING OF $5.5 BILLION

Altogether, the 100 highest-funded MBA startups of 2026 raised $5.5 billion, down $2.05 billion from the $7.56 billion raised by 2026’s top 100. Still, 2026 marks the fifth-highest funding total since Poets&Quants began tracking the figure in 2015, topping every year from 2015 through 2021.

It remains well below the recent funding boom, however. The total peakied at $9.22 billion in 2023, before falling to $6.99 billion in 2024 and $7.56 billion last year. This year’s haul is about 40% below the 2023 high-water mark.

Since 2015, a startup founded by a Stanford Graduate School of Business MBA has topped Poets&Quants’ highest-funded list five times in 12 years. But the Silicon Valley powerhouse has now gone four straight years without a No. 1 finish, its last coming in 2021 when Divvy Homes led the list with $299.04 million in funding.

INSEAD startups then held the top spot for three consecutive years — twice with grocery-delivery startup Gorillas and once with Capchase — before London Business School broke the streak last year. Harvard Business School has topped the list once, while Poolside gives IE Business School its first No. 1 finish in the list’s history.

NEXT PAGE: Which B-schools have the most MBA startups?

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