Students of the promotion of the Harvard Business School made an executive decision – fortunes are taken by access, not on exclusion.
Seven members of the HBS promotion in 2025 raised almost $ 1 million for a class fund they call Twenty25 Ventures.
The fund is built by contributions from the grade class and will only invest in peer startups – An investment structure that takes off in business schools while students seek to find a foot in a traditionally rarefied financing ecosystem.
The founders – Yoav Anaki, Yuval Efrat, Lisa Yan, Insoo Chang, Lindsay Atkeson, Madison Mcilwain and Rob Muldowney – began discussions from 2023 to 2024, and began collecting funds in September. They close the fund this month and will start deploying it in April over a period of five years.
They also recruited a high-level venture capital manager as advisers, notably Alex Kayyal, partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners, partner of Bryan Kim at Andreessen Horowitz, Sara Choi, partner of Wing Venture Capital, and Sanjay Rao, Directorial Partner at Tau Ventures. Several of his more than 10 advisers are former HBS.
“It is not surprising that the people of the Harvard Business School do business together, right? This is the genesis of the school,” Mcilwain told Business Insider. The Twenty25 thesis is that if you have just supported an index of HBS graduates in your class, you would outdo the S&P. “”
Harvard MBA graduates have raised nearly $ 80 billion in venture capital funding in the past decade, more than any other business school, according to Pitchbook. The most funded companies in the school include the Northvolt battery manufacturer, the Kavak used car market and the Cloud Security security startup. He arrived second after the Stanford Graduate School of Business for the greatest number of founders of Unicorn, producing approximately 4.2 for 1,000 graduates, according to a LinkedIn post by Stanford professor Ilya Strebulaev.
Twenty25 will invest in startups collecting $ 500,000 or more in rounds carried out by institutional investors and selected capital companies. The average size of investment checks is between $ 10,000 and $ 50,000.
Its objective is to give more HBS students a chance to draw on their exclusive network before embarking on their careers and creating wealth.
“We wanted to reduce the barrier to the entrance and give more of our classmates the opportunity to participate in business investment,” said Mcilwain. “The creation of generational wealth begins with access.”
The fund takes students’ checks as low as $ 3,000 and caps at $ 100,000, or 10% of the fund.
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Students want to bet on each other
The Harvard fund is inspired by Stanford 2020, a venture capital fund launched by students from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2020 to invest in the startups of their classmates. The fund collected the support of almost half of the 2020 class, raising more than $ 1.5 million and had a minimum of $ 3,000 for contributions.
In an interview in 2020 with Techcrunch, the founder of Stanford 2020, Steph Mui, said that the fund was born from the inaccessibility of providential investment-through which individuals of net value putting capital in start-up companies: “Only accredited people can do so, it is very elite,” she said.
“We have started to think more if we can really do something in which the whole class could participate, or at least make it more accessible to more than these small pockets of people who do it behind,” she said.
Later, she told the point of sale that the majority of people who contributed to Stanford 2020 were check editors for the first time.
Pin, which means Power in Numbers, is a platform that Mui has driven from Stanford 2020. It manages all administrative, legal and tax work for investment clubs. Twenty25 uses it because it facilitates the management of lower scale checks than a standard platform for unions.
In recent years, funds supported by students with similar structures have emerged in other business schools.
Students from the Haas School of Business from the University of California launched Courtyard Ventures in 2021, which has since deployed more than $ 3 million in several funds, investing about $ 50,000 at $ 100,000 per startup, according to its website. Its general partners also invest about half of their performance costs in campus groups supporting startups.
Last year, two members of the Wharton class in 2026 launched Center City Ventures. The fund perceives contributions to students in the 2026 class from $ 3,000, and will invest money in startups founded across university, according to its website.
The past few years have been difficult for MBA graduates, especially those of the most elite institutions. The hiring of white collars took a sure blow the amount that companies are ready to pay the post-MBA hires. The share of graduates of the best schools like Harvard, Stanford and Wharton with jobs three months after obtaining the diploma has decreased since 2021.
But class funds in these schools argue that students see real value in their network.
“This fund is not just a question of startups,” she said. “This is inclusion, property and community.”
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