AI Startups Are Breaking Funding Records Around The World

It seems that venture capitalists are really picking up the tabs of artificial startups, not only in the US but around the world. Venture Beat presented recently the Q3 2019 data from the National Venture Capital Association. According to that information “965 AI-related companies in the U.S. have raised $13.5 billion in venture capital through the first 9 months of this year. That should eclipse the 1,281 companies that raised $16.8 billion in 2018, according to the 3Q 2019 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.”

NVCA noted that the sector is still in its youth and that“the average deal size and valuations still tend to fluctuate quite a bit from quarter to quarter.” Still, as they also point out, “have clearly moved well past early, experimental stages, which tend to attract lots of little bets as investors explore the terrain.”

At the same time, TechWorld cites a 2018 report by the McKinsey Global Institute that AI “could contribute an additional global economic activity worth around $13 trillion by 2030, by which point around 70 percent of companies will have adopted at least one form of AI”.TechWorld adds that eight of the top 20 European universities and 40% of European tech unicorns’ currently reside in the UK, while AI venture capital firm Asgard estimates that the UK has the largest “ecosystem of AI startups” in Europe.

TechWorld also lists 36 AI startups that deserve attention, and its top five choices are the following:

[ ] Distributed, an on-demand workforce platform that assists businesses focused on delivering digital outcomes faster and to a higher standard.

[ ] SenSat builds digital copies of physical environments, where artificial intelligence models can be released to help understand the parameters of that environment and provide valuable feedback. The one-line mission statement is: “To teach computers how to understand the physical world we all live in.”

[ ] CognitionX, an advice marketplace targeting the growing field of AI and machine learning, built by Charlie Muirhead and Tabitha Goldstaub.

[ ] Phrasee, which uses AI to create marketing copy for customers including The Times, SuperDry and Domino's. The company has developed a language generation algorithm that analyses engagement from previous campaigns to craft the content in email subject lines, push notifications and social media ads.

[ ] Deputi, which is leveraging AI to help businesses minimize the costs of day-to-day operational tasks using automation.

On the European continent itself, Silicon Anals consider the Dutch companies as the “early adopters of AI and are competitive when it comes to the importance placed on new AI developments.” It points to the following three AI companies as top to watch in the coming period:

– Dashmote (Amsterdam, current funding € 2.5 million)  creates artificial intelligence technology that helps companies make complex decisions based on data gathered from images and text uploaded to the internet. Founded in 2014 by Dennis Tan (CEO), Matthäus Schreder (CPO), and Stefan Tan (CFO), the company’s platform is capable of analyzing the images and gain valuable insights.

–  Doculayer.ai ( The Hague, € 3 million) is a content management platform that leverages AI to manage unstructured information. The company’s technology is capable of analyzing the content automatically, enhance the findability, and help enrich the quality of the documents.

– Owlin (Amsterdam, € 3.1 million), which provides real-time news analysis. The company uses the latest AI and machine learning technologies to monitor, analyze, and visualize more than 2.8 million news sources worldwide in 8 languages and all in near real-time.

In Asia, for example, China’s SenseTime Group, currently regarded as the world’s most valuable AI startup, has seen its valuation breach US$7.5 billion this year, following massive investments from the likes of SoftBank. The same investor as Nikkei Asian Review reports, “is accelerating its investment into the country's artificial intelligence startups despite the verdict of its parent group's founder that Japan is ‘underdeveloped’ in the cutting edge technology.

All this indicates that 2019 could be the best for AI startups yet.