AI Landscape Austria

The Austrian AI Landscape: An overview of the entire ecosystem covering startups, companies, research institutions as well as their geographic distribution and growth.

Welcome to the 2024 edition

This is our eighth AI landscape and “state of the union” of the Austrian AI ecosystem.

Here are the prior versions: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023

We also did regional deepdives for Carinthia, Styria and Vienna, as well as a spotlight on international companies choosing Austria as the base for their AI operations.

Since starting this activity in 2017 the AI space has never been as fast moving, diverse and exciting as today. What started as an overview of mostly niche players in a nascent field is nowadays covering almost all verticals and company functions.

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Number of companies

The 2024 edition of the AI Landscape Austria features 450 logos in total.

That number is up from 390 last year, with 80 new entrants to the map. (difference due consolidation, exists and a low number of bankruptcies)

For reference, the very first version in 2017 had just 52 logos.

To keep the number in check we introduced a minimum size requirement for service providers: if your company has less than 10 employees according to it’s LinkedIn page, we will include you in a regional landscape but not the Austrian edition.

Categorization

One of the more challenging aspects of the process is categorization—particularly deciding how to classify a company when its product offerings span multiple areas. This issue becomes increasingly relevant each year, as many startups and companies continue to broaden their portfolios. At the same time, placing each company into multiple categories would overwhelm an already crowded landscape.

To address this, our approach has been to categorize companies based on their core offering or the area they are best known for. Consequently, each startup appears in only one category, even if they operate in multiple domains.

We make exceptions for companies who have both a strong service and product offering (e.g. Craftworks & Navio).

Major changes this year:

• IT Service providers and consulting are now in their own cluster, to account for the rapid growth of companies offering AI services
• New category ‘Operations & Search’ for the growing number of companies dealing with knowledge retrieval and custom chatbots, driven by LLMs.

Summary & Key Findings

In 2024 the Austrian AI ecosystem developing at a steady pace with some important key trends emerging:

Growing concentration: Vienna accounts for almost 80% of additions in the “AI startups & companies” section, skewing the overall distribution even more towards the capital. For a long time Vienna accounted for approx. 50% of all companies, recently this number has surpassed 60%.

Expected growth, unexpectedly low attrition: In an emerging field like AI and machine learning YoY growth is expected. Against the international trend, Austria had very few bankruptcies in the AI space. In total they amount to less an 10 companies, whereas the figure in 2023 was almost at 30.

The Corporate AI wave has arrived: We introduced the corporate early adopter section in 2021, since then growth has been rather limited. 2024 saw a large jump in corporates embracing AI, either with in-house teams, spinouts or digital products. Major driver of this development is the increase of open source LLMs, which offer great flexibility in terms of local deployment and use-cases, as well as a lower entry barrier in solution development.

AI going mainstream: The same holds true for IT service providers & consultants, where we saw unprecended growth within just one year. Being able to develop AI solutions around LLMs will be as mainstream as frontend development within the next 3 years.

Implications of the European AI Act: As expected a growing number of companies working on trustworthy AI and compliance solutions has emerged, especially in life science, health & medtech.

About the project

Last but not least, this is a 100% non-profit undertaking, we neither accept sponsorships, nor can you “buy” yourself a slot on the landscape. Furthermore, no tax money was ever used to create this landscape means we als don’t apply for grants or similar public funding. If you still want to support the project to cover the hosting cost just head over here and make a small donation. (so far we raised the breathtaking amount of EUR 25 over the last 7 years)

Missing something? Head over to our self-service form and describe which companies we should consider in the next update.

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