Summary & Key Findings

As the Austrian AI ecosystem continues to mature, we get a better picture of which trends are here to stay. In this year’s edition of the AI Landscape Austria we see further industry domain specialization, the emergence of regional hubs and plateauing startup growth.

Overall, the Austria ecosystem keeps growing at a healthy number of startups each year, however growth has slowed down in 2020. Most AI startups are early stage (pre-seed or seed), however the number of pre-series A and series-A deals keeps increasing both in number and size.

Corporations have significantly ramped up their activities and investments in the AI space. This materializes in form of dedicated AI teams, start-up collaborations, spinouts or M&A. In parallel, solution providers build up their own AI capabilities but in most cases fail to grow beyond small teams, which complement the main lines of business.

Austrian talent gradually moves into the spotlight of Silicon Valley tech companies and has attracted Amazon, Facebook and Snap, which are doing AI research or product development in Austria. On top of that, enterprise solution providers like IBM, Google and Microsoft have a very strong local presence.

So far, the impact of Covid19 was neglectable both on the growth and attrition side. To get a clearer picture, we will monitor the next 6 months closely.

Key Statistics

• In total 250 organizations are part of the AI landscape
• thereof, approx 120 qualify as a startup
• Growth decreased to a new low with 7% YoY (with the possibility to rebound to 10% in Q4)
• Approx. 50% of all startups are headquartered in Vienna
• The ongoing talent shortage in NLP continues to hamstring startups dealing with text analysis

Cut-off date for v3.0 was 26.09.2020.