A new report from CB Insights suggests the majority of promising AI startups are still based in the US.
Despite increasing AI investments around the world, 65 percent of the top 100 AI startups were located in the US. However, some of the companies also had headquarters in other countries.
It’s little surprise to see the most promising AI companies based in the world’s largest economy, but some of the others are more surprising.
The UK and Canada were in joint second place as homes of the most promising AI startups, while China just slipped into third. Isreal took fourth place.
Aside from the UK, much of Europe had a poor showing in CB Insight’s research. Germany was the highest-ranking EU member in the report with just two promising AI startups.
AI relies heavily on data and the EU has some of the strictest data regulations in the world. Some experts believe this puts European companies at a significant disadvantage compared to their global counterparts. To help European AI startups overcome this challenge, the EU is currently considering a “single market” for data.
The UK continues to benefit from being the leading destination in Europe for foreign investment with the US being the country’s largest single investor. The UK is also home to the European headquarters of many Silicon Valley giants who benefit from the talent produced by the country’s renowned universities helping to address the global shortage of AI talent. Arguably, the most successful AI story out of the UK is that of DeepMind which was acquired by Google for over $500 million in 2014.
One of the 100 companies appearing on CB Insight’s top AI firms is InstaDeep, a UK-based AI R&D company that jointly published a research paper last year alongside DeepMind on a reinforcement learning algorithm called AlphaNPI.
Here are the other AI firms in this year’s top 100 sorted by category:
CB Insights analysed data on around 5,000 global AI startups for its research. According to the research firm, the healthcare category is currently showing the most promise followed by retail and warehousing.
4,300 startups in 80 countries have raised $83 billion since 2014, including $26.6 billion just last year, according to CB Insights. However, the share of investments into US-based AI firms dropped from 71 percent to 39 percent in that period.
You can find the full report from CB Insights here.
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