Bond produces more successful start-up founders than almost any other Australian university according to new data published today.
Published in The Australian newspaper, the League of Scholars compiled information from Crunchbase, the top source of data on venture capital funded start-ups, to show which Australian universities had produced the most founders of successful start-ups.
The figures are based on the number of founders who reached the milestone of attracting venture capital funding. When adjusted for the size of each university, Bond was just beaten for the top spot by UNSW.
Bond can boast 18 graduates over the past 10 years who have founded successful start-ups, which equates to 97 founders for every 100,000 graduates when adjusted for student population.
The university has always had a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship, from its very inception almost 33 years ago as Australia’s first private university, and this latest data highlights the University’s contribution to the innovation economy.
Bond alumni who have gone on to found successful enterprises include Neeti Mehta Shukla, founder of the US$6.8 billion robotic process automation company Automation Anywhere; Christian Faes, whose property finance platform LendInvest was recently listed on the London Stock Exchange with a market capitalisation of US$389 million; and Jack Stevens, co-founder of Edstart, a start-up that makes it easier to for parents to pay private school fees. Edstart is backed by the National Australia Bank’s venture capital fund and recently raised $10 million.
Earlier this year Bond alumni John Christie, who founded modular home company ModnPods while still an MBA and Master of Finance student at Bond, secured Queensland Government funding to double the size of the ModnPods Arundel factory, allowing them to produce 200 modular homes a year.
The State Government support would allow ModnPods to expand its current 1400sqm factory to 6200sqm, cutting pod construction time from 12 to four weeks.
Mr Christie’s business success was borne out of Bond’s Australian-first Transformer program, a fee-free, extracurricular option for all students that’s designed to foster and support start-ups.