The European Artificial Intelligence Landscape | More than 400 AI companies built in Europe
Software is eating the world and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the heart of this takeover. Since we at Asgard are deeply involved in the European AI market, we thought we would share our insights.
Main findings:
- Europe has a growing and thriving Artificial Intelligence industry
- The UK has by far the strongest AI ecosystem, followed by Germany, France and Spain
- London is Europe’s number one hub for AI companies, followed by Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Stockholm and Amsterdam
- Switzerland has the most AI companies per citizen
- Most AI companies are in the data analytics market
- There are some mature and well-funded AI companies in Europe
- Only 60% of companies claiming to be AI firms actually are
Get the full list of all 409 European AI companies for free
The European Artificial Intelligence Landscape and largest AI hubs in Europe
The European Artificial Intelligence Landscape — click here for a higher resolution
The United Kingdom takes the lead as the strongest AI ecosystem in Europe. We have counted 121 AI firms in the UK, with London clearly the largest hub.
In second place is Germany (51), with Berlin as the main AI hub supporting 30 AI companies.
France (39) and Spain (31) follow in third and fourth place.
There are also growing AI industries in Switzerland (21), Sweden (19) and the Netherlands (17).
Italy (14), Russia (13) and Finland (11) follow.
AI companies from the UK, Germany and France account for over 50 % of the European total. These numbers are not surprising given their more mature digital ecosystems, a requirement for growing complex AI companies.
Switzerland has the Most AI Companies Per Capita
An interesting side note is that some countries perform better when taking population into account. In this case, Switzerland leads the field, followed by Finland, the UK, Sweden, Ireland and Denmark. The UK is an outlier here as Spain, Germany and France all have significantly fewer AI companies per citizen.
Data Analytics Companies Dominate European AI Industries
Data Analytics companies make up the bulk of AI firms in Europe, perhaps due to AI needing data and its emergence from the Cloud and Big Data trends of recent years.
Sales & Marketing AI firms tend to solve well-known problems with this new abundance of data, and take advantage of improvements in NLP (natural language processing) and NLG (natural language generation) within the mobile / IoT world. We therefore see many new companies in the fields of Text Analytics and Conversational AI.
Customer Service and Personal Assistants have been very popular fields in which to start companies, supported by the advances in frameworks and free APIs.
Robotics is one of the oldest fields to use AI. However, we are not yet seeing an increase in the number of robotics companies.
On the other hand, we still have too few companies in the fields of Logistics, Education, and Travel using Artificial Intelligence.
Best Funded European AI Companies
Once a firm’s technology becomes a commodity, it becomes difficult to remain an AI company. Many grow out of their AI definition and develop into something else. However, we have identified ten companies which still run as AI companies, even after larger funding rounds.
http://www.stratifiedmedical.com
Data & Process
We compiled a list of 715 companies based in Europe claiming to be in the AI industry. We took the data from Crunchbase, AngelList, and our own research.
We then excluded companies which are inactive, agencies, consultancies, have been acquired, have a closed beta, or do not use machine learning. Additionally we attempted to exclude those which appeared only to use AI as a marketing tool, adopting buzz words such as “customer intelligence”, “marketing automation”, and “big data optimization”.
We may have missed some companies out, for example if they are too young, in stealth, or if we simply never heard of them. We apologise for this and will include them next time — just send us an email to contact@asgard.vc.
What is Artificial Intelligence? The definition is constantly changing. What we see as AI today could be standard software next year.
To get the list of all 409 AI companies, click here.
If you are interested in meeting European AI entrepreneurs, researchers and thought leaders, then join us for our Rise of AI 2018 conference.
Many thanks to Milette for investing weeks of her time to generate the data. Unfortunately, there is as yet no AI for identifying AI companies.
