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.
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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.