IIT entrepreneurs have created fourth-largest number of unicorns in the world - It's more than MIT!

IITians have done it again! IIT Entrepreneurs have created 12 unicorns so far, thereby becoming creators of the fourth-largest number of Unicorns (privately held companies valued at more than $1 billion) in the world.

It is precisely for this reason, India is recignized as the world's third-largest startup hub. Interestingly, a 2014 study by Pitchbook Data, a US private equity and research firm had ranked IITs as fourth among top 50 universities globally, whose graduates were entrepreneurial. It said around 264 entrepreneurs founded 205 companies and had raised a total of $ 3.15 billion in venture capital and private equity funding.

According to a report by Sage, a UK-based accounting and payroll company, IITians are next only to Stanford University, which tops the list with 51 Unicorns, Harvard (37) and the University of California (18).

A major credit to them is also that IITs' ranking on the list is higher than Massachusetts Indstitute of Technology (MIT), whose alumni have set up nine unicorns.

OUR HEROES:

Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, co-founders of India's largest e-commerce firm Flipkart graduated from IIT Delhi, as also Rohit Bansal, co-founder of smaller rival Snapdeal.

InMobi, the ad tech firm, which turned profitable last quarter, is founded by Naveen Tewari, Abhay Singhal and Amit Gupta, all from IIT Kanpur.

Bhavish Agarwal and Ankit Bhati, co-founders at Ola, the country's largest taxi aggregator graduated from IIT Mumbai.

Some other names are Sanjay Sethi of Shopclues, Deepinder Goyal of Zomato, Jyoti Bansal of AppDynamics and KV Rao of Zuora.