UC Berkeley has a long legacy of innovations and leaders that have created groundbreaking products, revolutionary companies, and entirely new industries. The university plays a critical role in California’s economy. The campus continues to expand the dynamic ecosystem that fosters research and its translation into real world applications, including incubator and accelerator space on and off campus.

• Since 1988, over 250 startup companies have been founded to commercialize IP rights under license from UC Berkeley.
• The university holds the the largest CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing portfolio in the United States with 41 US patents to date.
• As of July 2020, companies under the IP licenses from Berkeley have commercialized more than 730 products.
• The Berkeley Research Infrastructure Commons (RIC) program enables early stage (pre-product sales) startup  companies affiliated with UC Berkeley to temporarily conduct new product R&D in faculty labs - under certain conditions and rigorous oversight.
• A drug royalty, monetized for $93 million, helps fund biological research facilities, students, faculty recruitment and retention, and new initiatives.
• UC Berkeley is 1 of 5 universities that founded two-thirds of all biotechnology companies in California.

Innovation

UC Berkeley has a long legacy of innovations and leaders that have created groundbreaking products, revolutionary companies, and entirely new industries. The University plays a critical role in California’s economy. Last year the campus continued to expand the dynamic ecosystem that fosters research and its translation into real world applications. As of June 2020, UC Berkeley owned:

Developing Entrepreneurial Talent

According to several recent surveys UC Berkeley continues to be a global leader in producing successful entrepreneurs.  

VC-Backed Entrepreneurs

Pitch Book ranked the top 50 universities that produced VC-backed entrepreneurs on a global basis — and in 2020 UC Berkeley came in second among all research universities, before Harvard, MIT, Columbia and others.

Successful Company Founders

CrunchBase published its 2021 survey ranking UC Berkeley among the top four universities from which the most successful company founders in the US had graduated.

According to Pitch Book, since 2006, Berkeley has cultivated over 1,300 founders and 1,225 companies that raised $36.3 billion in capital.

Companies Founded by UC Berkeley Faculty and Alumni

Steve Wozniak of Apple, Gordon Moore of Intel and Eric Schmidt of Goggle are among the many UC Berkeley alumni who have founded and run successful corporations. Other prominent companies founded by UC Berkeley affiliates: