To secure funding for your start-up, you need solid numbers, a great product — and absolute faith in what you’re doing.
This is why it is chiefly the job of the CEO, rather than a hired salesperson or marketer, to press palms and bring in the bucks.
“[R]eceiving a pitch from anyone who isn’t one of the company’s founders — […] ideally the CEO — is a huge red flag for most investors.” explains founder and investor Haje Jan Kamps. “Investors are a different beast than your run-of-the-mill customers… They rarely see a pitch and reach for the checkbook, only to wait for the big bucks. Most investors have a desire to build an ongoing relationship of sorts with their investments.”
Of course, it helps if the CEO has a strong profile, plenty of energy and charisma to spare. Fundraising is a full-on quest that leaves little time for other business. From raising the seed funding that turns an early idea into a serious prospect to navigating the politics of bringing significant late-stage investors into the room, the CEO needs to be both smart and bold.
But who is doing the best job of it?
Data analysts at Switch On Business used corporate fundraising data from Crunchbase to uncover the past and present CEOs who have secured the most funding during their tenure in companies headquartered in each U.S. state.
Key Findings
- Hock Tan is the CEO who has secured the most funding for any U.S. company, raising $100,000,000,000 ($100 billion) for Broadcom Limited in California.
- Albert Bourla has secured the most in New York, raising $31 billion for Pfizer.
- Patrick Collison is the finance CEO who has secured the most, raising $8,746,009,000 for Stripe in California.
- Karen Benson is the CEO who has secured the most in Florida, raising $6.2 billion for Royal Caribbean Group.
The CEOs That Have Secured Most Funding by State
Hock Tan is president and CEO of the California-based semiconductor and infrastructure software solution firm Broadcom Limited. The Harvard Business School and MIT graduate has raised $100 million for Broadcom — the most of any U.S. CEO. Tan personally earned $103.2 million in 2017 to become the highest-paid CEO that year.
These days, Tan is more of an investor — snapping up companies for millions or billions of dollars to add to Broadcom’s 20+ independent product divisions. Each of those divisions, in turn, has investment autonomy, thanks in part to Tan’s fundraising. “They are [each] allowed to invest as much as they need to, to get to be number one or maintain their number one position,” he told the Financial Times.
Tan’s astonishing fundraising total is over three times that of Albert Bourla, the top fundraiser in New York, who has secured $31 billion for big pharma firm Pfizer. Bourla, who joined Pfizer in 1993 and became CEO in 2019, raised the money in the company’s largest debt offering ahead of buying cancer drugmaker Seagen in 2023.
“With one of the largest investments in Pfizer’s history, we are going all in on cancer with the goal of delivering breakthroughs that drastically improve the lives of people with cancer,” said Bourla, who himself profited heartily from the sale of Pfizer shares during Covid.
We went one step further with our research.
After analyzing the academic backgrounds of the CEOs who secured the most funding in each state, we uncovered that many are Harvard and UPenn grads. The table below shows where CEOs of heavily funded startups went to school:
| School | No. of heavily funded CEOs |
|---|---|
| Harvard University | 10 |
| University of Pennsylvania | 8 |
| Stanford University | 6 |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 6 |
| Brigham Young University | 3 |
| University of Alabama | 3 |
| University of Maryland | 3 |
| University of Tulsa | 3 |
| Yale University | 3 |
| Columbia University | 2 |
| Georgia Institute of Technology | 2 |
| Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi) | 2 |
| Northwestern University | 2 |
| University of Arkansas | 2 |
| University of California, Berkeley | 2 |
| University of California, Davis | 2 |
| University of Montana | 2 |
| University of Nebraska-Lincoln | 2 |
| University of Oxford | 2 |
The Tech CEOs That Have Secured Most Funding in America
Next, we looked specifically at CEOs of tech companies. While Hock Tan remains the nation’s top fundraiser in this context, New York’s top earner switches from Pfizer’s Albert Bourla to Verizon’s Lowell C. McAdam.
Still, New York remains in second place since McAdam has raised $28.9 billion for the telecoms and internet company — barely $2 billion less than Bourla at Pfizer. McAdam left his role at Verizon in 2018. While there, he doubled down on wireless and 5G technology while also seeming to contradict himself regarding his investment intentions in traditional media.
But this was, in fact, exemplary of his flexible, problem-solving approach: “Hold up a problem like a diamond and look at it from different perspectives,” he said to WeSalute. “The problem may seem insurmountable from one perspective, but if you flip it around, you may find it to be solvable. I use this technique at Verizon Wireless where we look at a lot of problems with our senior management team and turn them into opportunities.”
Iowa’s biggest tech fundraiser is Julie Iskow, who has raised $625 million for software-as-a-service (Saas) finance company Workiva — whose customers include more than 80% of Fortune 1000 companies.
Iskow draws attention to the broader picture when managing a company’s profile and keeping it viable for investors: “Companies are recognizing more and more that those non-financial factors, along with financial factors, are critically important for companies to understand and to manage, and it’s also good for the investors of companies to understand what those risk factors are.”
The Finance CEOs That Have Secured Most Funding in America
Finally, we zeroed in on the top fundraisers in finance. Once more, the CEO of a California-based company comes out on top. This time, it is Patrick Collison, chief executive of San Francisco/Dublin-based payments SaaS firm Stripe.
Collison, 35, co-founded Stripe in 2010, aged just 22, with early investors, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel. In 2016, Collison’s co-founder brother, John, became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire when the pair raised a further $150 million from Alphabet. To date, Collinson has raised $8.75 billion for Stripe.
Melissa Smith is Maine’s top fundraiser in finance — and overall. The Wex CEO has raised $400 million for her company. Wex is a “global commerce platform for fuel and fleet, employee benefits, and business payments,” and Smith was CFO during the company’s IPO in 2005, later becoming CEO in 2014. She has tripled the revenue at Wex during her ten-year tenure as CEO, during which time she has also had three children.
“I actually became pregnant almost immediately after starting my role as WEX’s first-ever female CEO,” Smith told Authority Magazine. “It was a unique experience to work through with my board how best to disclose my pregnancy, and to ensure we were complying with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s rules… Out of an abundance of caution, we decided to do an interview with The Wall Street Journal, in which I announced my pregnancy.
“[…] Immediately after that interview was published, I received an influx of supportive communications in and outside of my company, including from customers and investors.”
A CEO for All Seasons
While some CEOs among America’s top fundraisers have relatively traditional backgrounds, a closer look reveals idiosyncrasies even among the more classical leaders. Meanwhile, CEOs such as Melissa Smith and Patrick Collison have introduced new profiles and approaches to the rapidly changing world of corporate investment and venture capitalism.
However, along with the ideas, charisma and sales skills that a CEO needs to bring thousands or millions of dollars to their young company, responsibility has become a more critical asset than ever. As mind-boggling as some of the figures raised by these CEOs may be, they are not just figureheads for bringing in cash; they are the moral compass by which their companies — and, in turn, the nation — set a course.
Methodology
To determine the CEO that secured the most funding in every state, we reviewed data on corporate fundraising from Crunchbase. Past and present CEOs were ranked based on the total funding amount raised during their tenure. Fundraising amounts within each state were compared based on the U.S. headquarters of the fundraising company. Data on funding amounts and dates are from Crunchbase. Data is correct as of February 2024.
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