« back to reports
Q4 2020
Emerging Tech Research: Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
February 26, 2021
Fill out the form to download a preview of this report. The full report is available through the PitchBook Platform.
Recent IPOs of Palantir, C3.ai, and Upstart have attracted high interest from public market investors, demonstrating that enterprise AI has become a standalone investment category. The VC ecosystem has incubated the long development cycles needed to bring AI systems to market, resulting in large companies disrupting legacy industries including government contracting, oil & gas, and consumer lending.
Our Q4 installment of Emerging Tech Research on AI & ML includes a deep dive on disclosure of AI architecture in the S-1 filings of C3.ai and Upstart. The report also tracks major industry trends, covering developments in MLOps, computational biology and more. Key takeaways include:
- AI & ML VC deal activity in 2020 was led by healthcare, consumer, enterprise IT, and autonomous vehicles, with each category raising over $5 billion. Declines occurred in financial services, AI core, AI automation platforms, and computer vision.
- AI adoption remains immature as 2020 saw no gains in the share of data science organizations using AI nor the share making widespread usage of AI across their organizations.
- Recent AI & ML S-1 filings have used explicit descriptions of AI technology architecture to support high valuation multiples upon listing.