Founder DNA.
How breakout companies mint the next generation of founders. Where they come from, what they studied and how they migrate — then the startup-mafia lineage map and rankings, and the score that predicts the next ones.
Where unicorn founders come from.
Where the world's unicorn founders were born — resolved from biography and education history, not current address — and where the unicorns they created were built. Hover an origin to switch; group by country or continent, or rank countries per 1M inhabitants.
42% of unicorns created by founders from Europe were built in the US
Left: where the world's unicorn founders come from. Right: where the unicorns the highlighted origin's founders created were built. Hover or tap an origin bar to switch.
Source: Dealroom.co
One number per origin — the share of unicorns based in their founders' home country: Sweden keeps 57%, the most in Europe. The US keeps 95%, Israel 24%, and none of Ukraine's 34 are based in Ukraine.
Who builds at home
Unicorns based in the founders' home country, as a share of all unicorns that origin's founders created. Origins with 15+ unicorns. Hover a row for the counts.
Source: Dealroom.co
What breakout founders studied.
Degrees, fields of study and the universities that mint breakout founders — 30,288 education records across 16,511 founders.
Highest degree attained
59.7% hold a postgraduate degree — 1 in 7 a PhD. Of 8,948 founders with degree data.
Fields of study
Founders holding degrees in several fields count once per field.
Those degrees cluster in a familiar set of schools — Stanford, MIT and Harvard top the table. Where the alumni build splits by school: Oxford's unicorn founders build more in the US than in the UK.
74% of unicorns founded by Stanford alumni were built in the US
Left: the universities with the most unicorn founders. Right: where the unicorns the highlighted university's alumni founded were built. Hover or tap a university to switch.
Source: Dealroom.co
Education is also where mobility starts: for a third of breakout founders, the first border crossing happens on the way to campus.
The first move happens at university
Where known-origin founders went to study — the on-ramp for the migration flows in section 04.
Breakout founders move — mostly west, mostly to the Bay.
Cross-border moves tracked through two lenses: where a founder comes from vs where their company sits today, and where the company was founded vs where its HQ is now.
The heatmap crosses every founder origin with every company location. The US column answers who founds American unicorns: 38% of its founder seats belong to founders born abroad.
Founder origin × company location
Founder seats behind the world's 3,260 researched unicorns — a founder counts once per unicorn founded. Rows: the founder's researched origin. Columns: where the unicorn is based today.
Source: Dealroom.co
Corridor by corridor the pull is one-directional: into the US, and into the Bay Area above all. Switch the lens to company relocations — the HQs follow the founders.
Flip from where founders leave to where they land and the pattern repeats: the strongest ecosystems are built by people born somewhere else. In the Bay Area 60% of startups have an immigrant founder, and in the US as a whole 54%.
Startup ecosystems run on immigrants
Default view counts startups with at least one immigrant founder, as a share of all startups in that location. Switch to founder level for immigrant founders as a share of the individual founders there — that share is lower, because immigrant founders usually build with local co-founders.
Source: Dealroom.co
How founders spread from one company to the next — and how each mafia ranks.
The lineage map first: click any node to trace its full lineage and see its stats — then jump to that mafia's chart. Drag to pan, ⌘-scroll (or the buttons) to zoom. Edge styles separate founder, employee, acquisition/spinout and investor links. Below it, the rankings.
How they rank — unicorns vs revenue scale.
Two ways to score a mafia: by the unicorns its alumni produce, or by the $100M+ revenue companies (a tougher bar, no valuation hype). Toggle outcome, narrow the cohort, change sort.
% of alumni startups (raised ≥$1M) that reached $100M+ revenue — a durability bar harder to fake.
The rankings show which mafias convert best. In absolute terms the biggest feeders are still the giants — the companies below have seeded the most alumni founders overall.
The biggest feeders
Companies whose alumni have founded the most startups — from 44,670 alumni-founder records.
One score to spot the next breakout founders.
Everything on this page — origins, education, mobility, lineage and rankings — feeds a proprietary founder-strength model. It already scores every founder behind the world's breakout companies, and it's learning to flag the next ones before they break out. The predictions live in the platform; this page is just the trailer.
Illustrative distribution — the model scores every founder and hunts in the right tail.
Map talent movement in real time.
The full Dealroom platform unlocks people profiles, founder backgrounds, alumni networks, hiring movement and AI talent signals across the global tech ecosystem.