Form D founders with a known alma mater: Columbia University

## What this measures

The number of people named on a venture-style Form D raise since 2015 (as an executive officer, director or promoter) whose Wikidata record says they were educated at Columbia University, counted cumulatively to each year end. To date: 5.

## Why it matters

Where founders studied is usually told from commercial startup databases. This is the part that public records can show: SEC filings name the people, Wikidata (CC0) names their schools.

## How to read it

Only as known-alma-mater coverage: 320 of 207,853 people named on venture-style raises since 2015 matched (0.15%). A school's count is a count of its founders who are in Wikidata, not of all its founders. Not comparable with PitchBook or other startup databases.

## What it does not say

Most founders have no Wikidata record, and the ones who do are the better-known ones, so the matched set leans to prominent founders and to schools whose alumni are well documented.

## How it's built

The Form D data sets list each raise's related persons by name. Palanor keeps raises the Form D dataset marks venture-like (never pooled investment funds) and matches a person to Wikidata only when their first and last name equal a Wikidata person's name or alias AND the issuer is that person's company in Wikidata (founder, CEO, chair, board member, director, owner or, for SEC filers, employer): by SEC CIK when Wikidata has one, else by exact company name, and only when exactly one person matches. Schools come from Wikidata's "educated at" (P69), higher education only, matched to ROR. Unmatched people are counted for the coverage rate and never stored.

## Source

Palanor calculation from the SEC Form D data sets (public domain) and Wikidata (CC0), with institutions from the Research Organization Registry (ror.org, CC0).