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.

What’s new on v2.1

Many new startups entered the scene, to select just a few:

• DeepOpinion with a groundbreaking approach to opinion mining from unstructured data and analysis capabilities on an unprecedented level
• Botbase by the Ventury is an assistant platform which will soon be pitched at RISE Hong Kong
• Strongest growth in "Medical & Health" with Medicus AI,Symptoma, Cogvis, Innophore and Ares Genetics
• new Category "AI Hardware" to highlight startup activity in this hot field
• eMentalist, a powerful big data solution to provide decision support by combining millions of internal and external datapoints
• AVI systems, an award winning startup from Lower Austria with world leading image analysis solutions and first forays into AI silicon
• Danube.ai - a startup which solves the age old problem of recommendation systems with a unique approach