The US accounted for four of the top five venture capital (VC) funded companies in the artificial intelligence (AI) space in 2019. Moreover, the top position was also occupied by an American firm, according to GlobalData, a leading and data analytics company.

The four American companies (Nuro Inc., Databricks Inc., Aurora Innovation Inc. and UiPath Inc.) collectively raised a total of US$2.8bn in VC funding during 2019, while the American firm Nuro Inc. (Nuro), which works in the autonomous driving space, raised US$940m, the highest VC funding among all AI companies during 2019.

Aurojyoti Bose, Lead Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “The US has been leading AI innovation globally. However, over the past few years, there has also been an AI race between the US and China. With the Chinese Government working towards the goal of making the country a global leader and developing the domestic AI industry worth US$150bn by 2030, according to China’s AI policy, tech companies in the country are also increasingly strengthening their presence in this space.”

Nuro was closely followed by China-based Megvii Technology Ltd (Megvii) – the only non-US company to feature in the list, which raised US$750m during 2019. Megvii works in the area of facial recognition.

Databricks Inc., a provider of unified data analytics platform, Aurora Innovation Inc., which works in autonomous driving space and UiPath Inc., which is active in the field of robotic process automation occupied the third, fourth and fifth position, respectively.

Bose concludes: “It will be interesting to see how the AI race between the US and China unfolds in the future and if the US is able to maintain its lead or Chinese companies succeed in challenging the dominance of American firms.”