Artificial Intelligence scaleups and their konwledge background in European cities

In the current summer of artificial intelligence, startups with radical innovations in this field can be a decisive factor for the future. Therefore, this paper examines the distribution of AI scaleups across European cities based on data from Dealroom.co on over 3,000 scaleups using AI technology (sceleups = startups raised more than €1 million in funding). The results first show that AI scaleups and their funding are extremely concentrated in literally a handful of cities (Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Cambridge, Copenhagen, Dublin, Helsinki, London, Madrid, Munich, Oslo, Paris, Stockholm, and Zurich). Second, this unequal distribution is embedded in Europe’s West-East divide, as even the major metropolises in Central and Eastern Europe lag far behind in this respect. Third, cities with renowned universities in Western and Northern Europe perform very well in terms of AI scaleups, especially relative to their population and economic output. One of the reasons for this is that they are also leaders in knowledge creation, measured by the number of patents filed by AI scaleups. Finally, the regression analysis also shows that there is a strong correlation between cities’ overall performance in terms of AI scaleups and the knowledge background of cities’ AI scaleups, which indicates the future challenges for lagging cities.