Foreign-Born Entrepreneurs Drive America's Unicorn Boom
The next time someone talks about restricting immigration, show them this: Nearly half of America’s billion-dollar startups were founded by people born outside the United States. Our research at Stanford’ s Venture Capital Initiative shows that immigrant entrepreneurs aren’t just contributing to the U.S. innovation ecosystem — they’re helping to lead it.
44% of US unicorn founders are immigrants, with India leading
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilyavcandpe/
The analysis of 1,078 founders behind 500 U.S. unicorns found that 474 founders — 44% — were born outside the United States. Nearly half of America’s most successful entrepreneurs came from somewhere else.
India tops the list with 90 unicorn founders, including Laks Srini of TriNet Zenefits and Jyoti Bansal of AppDynamics .
Israel follows with 52 founders, including Daphne Koller of Coursera , Adi Tatarko of Houzz , and Eyal Navon of Hippo Insurance . From Canada, we have 42 founders, including Stewart Butterfield of Slack , Shane Smith of Vice Media , and Michelle Zatlyn of Cloudflare .