The best UK universities to go to if you want to build a startup
Key Points
- Cambridge produced 580 ventures and Oxford 530 in the Redstone University Startup Index 2026
- UK universities held eight of the top ten places for ventures created among Europe's largest institutions
- Imperial College London was the most efficient at converting budget into startups, at 14.2 per €100 million
- The index analysed 1,050 institutions across the EU/EEA, UK and Switzerland
Graduates of the universities of Cambridge and Oxford have founded more than 1,000 ventures between them, according to the Redstone University Startup Index 2026.
The index, produced by venture capital firm Redstone with the think tank AlpMomentum, the Technical University of Munich and the University of Trier, mapped 1,050 academic institutions across the EU/EEA, the UK and Switzerland, which together run on combined annual budgets of more than €300 billion.
It identified 49,873 ventures founded by alumni, students, faculty and researchers between January and March 2026. The University of Cambridge accounted for 580 of them and the University of Oxford for 530, the two highest totals of any institution in the study.
UK institutions took eight of the ten places in the index’s “very large universities” cluster, ranked by the number of ventures created.
University College London recorded 465 ventures, Imperial College London 464, King’s College London 366 and the University of Manchester 351, with the universities of Leeds and Edinburgh also placing inside the top ten.
The University of Amsterdam and the Technical University of Munich were the only institutions from outside the UK to make the category.
The index also ranks institutions by efficiency, measured as the number of economically viable startups created per €100 million of annual budget.
Imperial College London topped the very large universities for the second consecutive year at 14.2 startups per €100 million, ahead of the University of Amsterdam on 14.1 and King’s College London on 11.7. The cluster averaged 7.6.
The London School of Economics and Political Science recorded the most alumni ventures of any of the 1,000 universities studied, at 554.
It also led the separate “large universities” efficiency ranking at 43.1 startups per €100 million, three times the next-best institution in its cluster.
Venture data was drawn from LinkedIn founder profiles collected through Sales Navigator, then filtered down to economically viable startups using survival rates based on Eurostat data.
The report separates alumni ventures from academic ventures, the latter covering IP-backed spinouts founded by faculty members and researchers.
Institutions were grouped into six peer clusters for comparison: very large, large, mid-sized and small universities, business schools, and public research organisations.
The index estimates that if every institution matched the efficiency of the top 10% within its peer group, Europe could add 445,000 startups over the next decade, generating €9 trillion in equity value, €5 trillion in GDP and 13 million jobs.
The report’s authors recommend that institutions treat entrepreneurship as a third pillar alongside teaching and research, and call on policymakers to tie institutional funding to the number of startups created.
