The German Artificial Intelligence Landscape

5 min readFeb 9, 2017

*click for a higher resolution of the map*

As a Venture Capital firm for Artificial Intelligence we follow the growing AI market closely. For the German AI Landscape Map, we created a list of over 600 European AI startups based on internal research mainly deriving from our network and Crunchbase.

Not every company that lists AI as a part of their product has AI in it. We have therefore taken the freedom to clean the raw data. We’ve ended up with 81 German Artificial Intelligence startups, which made it onto our map.

Most founders solve well-known problems with AI

We observe that the largest fields for AI startups in Germany are:

Customer support
Customer communication
Sales & marketing
Software development
Computer Vision / Image recognition

These five categories account for 48 % of German AI startups.

Since software engineers are closer to the topics machine learning and computer vision, they are more likely to start an AI company than others. We therefore see a large group of the companies with computer vision as their main product. Computer vision is one of the oldest fields of the new wave of deep learning technologies. This field already has a wide variety of software and datasets available so it is a more obvious market to pursue.

Customer support, sales, marketing and customer communication are also easy pickings. Non-technical founders often end up choosing one of these markets to set up their new startup.

On the other hand, we only have a few companies in the space of automotive, legal, industrial, supply chain, security, and logistics. Many founders lack the industry insights to pursue the real problems in an industry and therefore struggle to build a new solution for it.

Half of Germany’s AI startups are located in Berlin

Berlin is leading with 54 % of all German AI companies, followed by Munich, Hamburg and Frankfurt Am Main.

Berlin is the fourth largest global AI hub

On a global scale, North America have the most AI companies (921), ahead of Europe (632) and Asia (258).

Silicon Valley is the strongest AI hub, followed by London, Paris and then Berlin.

In the European AI landscape, UK is the strongest, with London being the major hub. Germany is second, followed by the Nordics, France, Benelux and a long-tail of other European ecosystems.

The European AI landscape is growing but it is still very much in its infancy. To further strengthen the European and German AI landscape we need to build strong startups in new sectors and markets. We also need to build a healthy ecosystem and nurture the local scenes inside Europe.

One of our initiatives to pursue this goal is to arrange an AI conference in Berlin.

If you like to connect with AI companies, AI investors and journalists, you are invited to join our conference Rise of AI in May 2017.

If your startup is missing on the list below, please contact us.

These are the German AI companies we have identified and sorted by category:

Automotive

German Auto Labs — https://www.germanautolabs.com

Business Intelligence

Mapegy — http://www.mapegy.com

12k Research — https://12k.co

Fedger — https://fedger.io

Customer Communication

WunderAI — http://wunder.ai