(Bloomberg) — Funding for European artificial intelligence startups, while still less than a quarter of US figures, hit a record high this year thanks to massive investments in newcomers building chatbots and self-driving cars.
AI firms in Europe raised $10.7 billion this year through September 30th, according to a report from venture capital firm Atomico. It’s a 52% jump from 2023, driven by large financing rounds in France’s Mistral, an OpenAI competitor, and Wayve Technologies Ltd., an autonomous driving company in the UK. Investors have poured $47.2 billion into US AI startups this year, according to the report.
Atomico cites a dearth of pension money in European’s technology sector as a major handicap. The report said that European pension funds — an estimated $9.6 trillion of assets under management — devote only a “rounding error” (0.007%) to the continent’s venture capital firms.
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