NCAA college football is on the verge of its first-ever championship playoff series, but the debate over which conferences top the rankings is actually over—when it comes to venture capital deals.
The PAC 12 conference is number one in the nation in a ranking of the number of third-quarter venture capital financings completed by alumni chief executives.
PAC 12 CEOs completed 165 venture capital deals and raised an average of $11.4 million, according to rankings published by PitchBook, a data and technology provider to the private financial markets.
The conference’s schools include Stanford, Oregon and UCLA as well as others in California, Colorado, Utah, Washington and Arizona.
The Ivy League ranked second with 138 deals at an average of $9.5 million.
Rounding out the top five were the Big 10 (131 deals, $12.4 million average); the ACC (76 deals, $12 million average); and the Big 12 (41 deals, $11.3 million average).
The sixth and final spot in the PitchBook Power Rankings went to the SEC—not the Securities and Exchange Commission, but the Southeastern Conference, which includes universities such as Alabama, Auburn, Louisiana State and Mississippi State, among several others. Chief executives from SEC schools completed the fewest number of deals—36—during the third quarter, but those deals had the highest average value, at $14.4 million.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) was the leading industry capital-raiser in four of the six conferences (PAC 12, Ivy League, Big 10, ACC), along with life sciences (Big 12) and mobile (SEC).
The top school rankings show Stanford in first place for the quarter, with 61 financing deals valued at an average of $15.5 million. Harvard was second (36 deals, $12.1 million average), followed by the University of California, Berkeley (33 deals, $11.5 million average), the University of Pennsylvania (28 deals, $6.5 million average), the University of Texas (27 deals, average $13.6 million) and the University of Michigan (25 deals, $14.7 million average).
