💬 Welcome to issue #77 of Between the Lines

Good morning & happy Thursday. We hope everybody had a splendid holiday season…welcome to 2023! If our StoryHouse announcement a few weeks ago wasn’t a good enough indication, we’ve got an exciting year ahead.

To start the year off, this week, we share data on Claremont’s impressive last decade of startup financing and how we compare to other top universities. It’s a Claremont world out there. 👇

~ Josh & Miles

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📊 6th Street Stats: 2022 PitchBook University Rankings

Authors: Josh Tatum & Miles Bird

A few months ago, PitchBook published its annual university rankings report, which compares undergraduate and graduate schools by the number of alumni entrepreneurs who have founded venture capital-backed companies. The rankings also compare schools on the number of venture-backed companies founded and the venture capital their respective alumni ecosystems raised. These 2022 rankings are based on the number of alumni founders whose companies received their first round of venture funding between Jan. 1, 2012, and Oct. 21, 2022.

Unfortunately, these rankings only include the top 100 universities by raw founder count. So, as you can imagine, given each of the Claremont school’s much smaller enrollment sizes and, consequently, smaller alumni and founder sizes, none of them make the cut by founder count. Don’t worry…it gets better, I promise.

Using our Airtable Claremont dataset scraped from Crunchbase, Forge, and Pitchbook, we found that Pomona College and Claremont McKenna would rank 16th and 22nd in these rankings if PitchBook ranked the universities by the amount of capital raised and not by founder count.

Furthermore, the rankings look even better when you consider all five of the undergraduate Claremont colleges as one university (we are The Claremont Colleges Consortium, after all!). Here’s how Claremont stacked against other top universities by raw capital raised during the 2012-2022 period:

*Pitchbook’s 2022 university rankings with the 5C’s included*

Suddenly, The Claremont Colleges, which didn’t even make it into the top 100 universities on a founder count basis, are now ranked 4th in the world on a raw capital raised basis and 3rd among U.S. universities.

325 entrepreneurs, 301 companies, $46B+ raised, and $142M raised on average per Claremont founder…not a bad decade for The Claremont Colleges.👇

Read The Full Article

🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Robi Ganguly

Claremont alumnus Robi Ganguly is the co-founder and CEO of Apptentive Inc. – a software development company that allows businesses to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather feedback across their mobile customer journeys. Before Apptentive, Robi spent time at WebEx Communications, where he built one of the industry's first SaaS pricing strategies. He then joined Yahoo, creating their Supply Management practices and setting many of today's ad standards. Since leaving Yahoo in 2008, he has advised several global brands on digital communications strategies, brand building, design, and testing.

His years of experience in customer satisfaction led him to found Apptentive together with fellow Claremont alumni Andrew Wooster and Mike Saffitz. They founded Apptentive on the idea that every company is in the business of earning customer loyalty and commitment. They recently announced their successful acquisition by Alchemer – a customer feedback platform backed by Claremont’s Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR).

Read The Press Release

💼 Who’s Hiring?: Frame Fertility & Tab For A Cause

Claremont graduate Corey van der Wal is the co-founder and CPO of Frame Fertility. Frame is the first and only evidence-based platform that enables the early identification of fertility risk, leading to better fertility and overall health. Developed with clinical experts, Frame’s approach alleviates a costly downstream fertility crisis for patients. The company was inspired by the challenging fertility journey of its wife/husband co-founders and digital health experts, Jessica and Corey. Last year, they announced a $2.8M Seed round led by Looking Glass Capital. They’re currently looking for an expert Product Designer to join the founding team:

Co-founded by Claremont grad Alex Groth, Tab for a Cause makes it extremely simple to do good daily. It replaces your browser's default new tab page with a beautiful background image, info on your social impact, and advertisements. Tab for a Cause uses the revenue from those ads to raise money for nonprofits like Conservation International, Partners In Health, Save the Children, Water.org, and many more. They raised over $1.5M last year for nonprofits and are looking to hire a Founding Engineer to take the company from $1.5M raised to $10M+. This job is an opportunity to be an early, foundational leader for a social-good consumer product with actual revenue and substantial impact:

Founding Engineer (Remote)

Check out the other ~5,000 open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 1,000+ remote jobs, 100+ internships, or 40+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention, Claremonsters!

If any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or, if you are an employer looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.

🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:

This week’s top read 🔥

Living Carbon shared their recent study on how past ice ages can be a blueprint for cooling our planet. The study explored correlations between the evolution of photosynthesis, CO2 levels, and global temperatures throughout Earth’s history. Claremont graduate Maddie Hall is the co-founder and CEO of Living Carbon – a climate tech company working to rebalance the planet’s carbon cycle using the inherent power of plants.

Living Carbon @living_carbon

Want happy climate news? Humans aren’t the first organism to disrupt a stable climate. We can be the first to learn from deep time & do something about it. Our series explores paleobiology & the inherent scalability of biological sequestration. Read more:

livingcarbon.comLiving Carbon - Deep TimeExplore the close correlation between the evolution of photosynthesis, CO2 levels, and global temperatures throughout Earth’s history.

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🍽️ BTL Snacks:

🌐 Building The Metaverse….. Not everyone believes in the staying power of the metaverse, but AI startup MeetKai is among the steadfast optimists. Co-founded by Claremont graduate and CEO James Kaplan, the company initially focused on conversational AI, aiming to build cutting-edge voice recognition and speech synthesis tech. Recently, MeetKai announced that it is launching several new platforms geared towards metaverse creators and users, including a way to digitize 3D spaces and buildings using any internet-connected device with a camera.
🔮 The Doctor’s 2023 Predictions….. Claremont alumnus Cooper Galvin shared his insights on emerging tech trends and significant investment opportunities he sees for 2023. He talks about the trends that excite him the most and gives his suggestions for a rough investment thesis to follow. Cooper is the co-founder and CEO of biotech startup Peregrine Biosense. Peregrine aims to be the global standard in seconds-scale diagnostics, retooling current healthcare infrastructure and enabling communities to be free of communicable diseases.

*Claremont-founded startups raised $46,787,955,731 during 2012-2022.

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📚🏆 Issue #77: 2022 PitchBook University…