Two former Oxbridge students have repaid their debts to society with some of the biggest donations that the universities have ever seen.

Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist in America, has given £25 million to his alma mater, Christ Church in Oxford, crediting the university with giving him the compass for the rest of his life.

Ros Edwards and her husband Steve have given £30 million to her former college, New Hall in Cambridge, and will be rewarded by having it named after them. It will become Murray Edwards College after its founder, the late Dame Rosemary Murray, and Mr and Mrs Edwards.

The record endowments are the start of the Americanisation of Britain’s elite universities. Both Oxford and Cambridge are using Ivy League fundraising techniques to try to raise at least £1 billion. They hope that the money will help them to reduce their dependence on state funding and recreate 19th-century levels of educational philanthropy.

Mrs Edwards was a student at New Hall in the 1980s, reading natural sciences. Her husband went to Oxford. The couple made a fortune from the $700 million (£361 million) sale of their software company, Geneva Technology, in 2001. Mr Edwards had set up the IT consultancy in 1989 using £1,000 he had received in redundancy. They began to work together, married and built Geneva Technology into a world leader in telecom billing systems. They sold out in 2001 to US company Convergys in an all-share deal which made them worth about £240 million. Their donation will allow the college to step up its efforts to recruit more working-class students. Mrs Edwards said: “We need to fund our universities so that they can compete with richly endowed ones in the United States. Britain is a value-added country — we live by our brains.”

New Hall took its name as an interim measure with the expectation that it would take another once a donor was found to endow and christen it. It was founded by Dame Rosemary, the first woman Vice-Chancellor of the University, who died in 2004, aged 91. A graduate of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, she taught chemistry at Royal Holloway College and Sheffield University before joining the Admiralty Signals Department on the outbreak of the Second World War.

When women at Cambridge achieved full degree status in 1948, she began to take an active part in the university’s development. She founded the women-only New Hall in 1954 and became President of the college ten years later. She retired in 1981.

The donation to Christ Church is the largest in its 484-year history. Mr Moritz, a former journalist, now a partner at the California-based venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, said that living in the US had given him a new perspective on giving to education. He gave the money with his partner, Harriet Heyman.

Mr Moritz, who is originally from Cardiff, read history at Christ Church between 1973 and 1976 and moved to America soon afterwards, working in a variety of roles with Time Warner.

In 1986 he joined Sequoia Capita, focusing on software and services investments. He has accumulated vast personal wealth through investments in internet companies including Google, YouTube and PayPal. He has served on the board of Google and is worth £651 million, making him Britain’s 125th richest man according to The Sunday Times Rich List. He lives in San Francisco with Ms Heyman, a former journalist with The New York Times.

He told The Times: “I watch the way in which the best universities in the US have managed their investments. This now is an opportunity for Oxford to embark down the same road. It may be a little later but it’s not too late.”

He is now using his business clout to raise money for the university in America. “I have a very large tin I can rattle in front of very influential people,” he said.

The two universities aim to help build up endowments worth billions of pounds that could be used to fund students from deprived backgrounds.

The donations follow a drive by the Government to persuade the super-rich to make multimillion-pound donations to their former universities.

John Denham, the Universities Secretary, said that graduates who had built up great financial wealth in the City or in industry had a responsibility to give something back to help others.

In April he announced a £200 million matched funding scheme, through which the Government will pledge to match donations to universities, made in cash or in shares, over the next three years, starting from August 1.

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