AI Landscape Austria 2021

Summary & Key Findings

In 2021 the Austrian AI ecosystem developing at a steady pace with some important key trends emerging:

Category growth & diversification

Unlike previous years only a small number of categories was newly created e.g. gaming, geoAI or MLOps.

The more important story of 2021 was the maturing of existing categories such a privacy or GreenTech/CleanTech into areas with significant startup activity. Part of the reason for this growth were specific funding instruments such AI for Green and Trustworthy AI, which paved the way for a new wave of founders.

New Cluster: Early adopters

Corporations ramped up their activities and investments in the AI space. This materializes in form of dedicated AI teams, start-up collaborations, spinouts and increased M&A activity. At the same time the public sector is very active and positions itself as the first customer for AI-based solutions. This makes Austria a very attractive location for international startups in this area.

To account for these developments we introduced a new cluster "Early Adopters" in the landscape.

Austria as an AI hub for European operations

In previous years we pointed out that Austrian talent gradually moved into the spotlight of Silicon Valley tech companies, resulting in local AI operations of Amazon, Meta (Facebook) and Snap. AI Hubs opened during this first wave were mostly focused on doing AI research in Austria, utilizing local talent, with limited interaction with the local community.

In the last 12 months this movement gained steam and saw the opening of AI Centers of Excellence, European headquarters of AI companies up to international startups which chose Austria as the place to incorporate their business.

Impact of Covid19

Overall, the Austria ecosystem kept growing at a healthy pace and saw only a very limited number of companies going out of business or getting absorbed by larger entities.

The reason for this resilience is twofold:

Grant programs (local, nationwide, EU-wide) are a significant portion of startup funding. To soften the impact of Covid19 additional programs were created to ensure liquidity in the startup sector.
the Austrian AI ecosystem is very sector-driven, with more than 50% of startups specializing on a single vertical early on. In times of slowing business this enables startups to bootstrap within that sector without having to exclusively rely on the market performance of their actual product.

Media coverage

Cut-off date for v5.0 was 14.12.2021.