Carnegie Mellon's alumni, faculty, and staff have founded many notable companies, some of which are shown below.[146][147]
- Activision Blizzard, 1979 (as Activision), founding CEO Jim Levy (B.S., M.S.).
- Adobe Systems, 1982, co-founder Charles Geschke (Ph.D.).
- Sun Microsystems, 1982, co-founders Vinod Khosla (M.S.) and Andy Bechtolsheim (M.S.).
- Accel Partners, 1983, co-founder Jim Swartz (M.S.).
- NeXT, 1985, co-founding VP Engineering Avie Tevanian (M.S., Ph.D.).
- Transarc, 1989, co-founders Alfred Spector (Professor), Jeffrey Eppinger (B.S., M.S., Ph.D.), Mike Kazar (Ph.D.), Dean Thompson (B.S.).
- FORE Systems, 1990, co-founders Francois Bitz (B.S., M.S.), Onat Menzilcioglu (M.S., Ph.D.), Robert Sansum (Ph.D.) and Eric C. Cooper (Professor).
- Microsoft Research, 1991, founder Richard Rashid (Professor)
- IDEO, 1991, founder David M. Kelley (B.S.).
- Appaloosa Management, 1993, founder David Tepper (M.B.A).
- Red Hat, 1993, co-founder Marc Ewing (B.S.).
- Cognizant, 1994, co-founder Francisco D'Souza (M.B.A).
- Juniper Networks, 1996, founder Pradeep Sindhu (Ph.D.).
- Symphony Technology Group, 2002, founder Romesh Wadhwani (Ph.D.).
- Astrobotic Technology, 2007, founder Red Whittaker (M.S., Ph.D., Professor).
- Google X, 2010, co-founders Sebastian Thrun (Professor), Yoky Matsuoka (Professor), and Astro Teller (Ph.D.).
- Nest, 2010, co-founder Matt Rogers (B.S., M.S.).
- Duolingo, 2011, founders Luis von Ahn (Ph.D., Professor) & Severin Hacker (Ph.D.).
- Coursera, 2012, founder Andrew Ng (B.S.).
- Defense Innovation Unit, 2015, founder Maynard Holliday (B.S.)
- Argo AI, 2016, co-founder Peter Rander (M.S., Ph.D.).
- Nuro, 2016, co-founder Dave Ferguson (M.S., Ph.D.).
- Aurora Innovation, 2017, co-founder Chris Urmson (Ph.D.).
