German AI Startup Landscape (2019)
The second annual AI Startup Landscape

Why we built up a start-up landscape

Andrew Ng, one of the most renowned AI researchers, says: ‘AI is the new electricity.’ We can only imagine the impact AI will have on our daily lives in ten years' time. As a general-purpose technology, AI has unlimited applications. Many applications have the potential to augment human capabilities, significantly improve the quality of products and services, make processes more efficient and environmentally friendly, and ultimately free us from many tedious tasks.

Currently, the US and China are leading the way in AI adoption. So it's no surprise that most of the world's top 100 AI start-ups come from the US or China (see CB Insights AI 100). Although Germany is one of the world's strongest industrial nations and has a particularly strong network of SMEs, it is underrepresented among the best AI start-ups. In 2018, not a single German AI start-up was included in the list. In 2019, only one Berlin-based start-up (Twenty Billion Neurons) made it into the ‘AI 100’ list.

This is alarming because start-ups reflect a country's innovative strength. Germany must do much more to avoid falling behind. As Alan Kay said, ‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it.’

That is why appliedAI – together with our more than 40 partners from academia, government and industry – has set out to create an ecosystem in which AI start-ups can flourish and help shape the future of AI for the benefit of society. We support German AI start-ups in identifying pilot customers, accessing data, finding talent and selecting hardware resources.

Together with our contributors, the technology companies NVIDIA and Google, as well as eight leading venture capital firms (Digital+ Partners, Earlybird Capital, eCAPITAL, High-Tech Gründerfonds, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, Lakestar, Speedinvest and Unternehmertum Venture Capital Partners), we screened more than 1,000 start-ups to find the best AI start-ups in Germany. 214 AI start-ups stood out in particular and are presented in the following landscape.

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Location

Facts and figures

The concentration of AI start-ups in Berlin and Munich is relatively high, while the rest of Germany remains sparsely populated. 40.2% (2018: 38.6%) of AI start-ups are based in Berlin. Munich accounts for 26.6% (2018: 23.5%) of AI start-ups, followed by Karlsruhe with 4.2% (2018: 4.5%). Only cities with two or more start-ups are shown.

Funding

Facts and figures

Since 2009, the AI start-ups shown have raised a total of USD 1.2 billion in funding. Although Munich has 34% fewer AI start-ups than Berlin, they raised 24% more funding (Munich with USD 359 million vs. Berlin with USD 290 million). The average funding per start-up in Munich is also almost twice as high (factor 1.8) as in Berlin (USD 6.37 million vs. USD 3.41 million). Hamburg is an outlier (Kreditech: USD 437 million in total funding). Only cities with more than USD 1 million in total funding are shown.

Industries

Facts and figures

The majority of start-ups (44.9%) operate across multiple industries (see clusters ‘Enterprise Function’, ‘Enterprise Intelligence’ and ‘AI Technology Stack’). The three industries with the most AI start-ups are: transport & mobility (9.3%), healthcare & pharmaceuticals (7.0%) and manufacturing (6.1%).

Rights & permission to use

We consider it our duty to pass on this information. Feel free to use this landscape as part of a presentation, lecture or project. This is permitted and encouraged, as long as you always use the visual representation and refer to us accordingly. If you change anything in our landscape, you must mark this as your own modification. The content of this landscape is published under the CC-BY 4.0 licence.