Unfortunately, the same problem concerning smaller seed round size persists for AI. For the past 5 years, seed funding for AI-native startups in Canada has trailed behind US peers. Canadian AI startups are typically receiving half as much as US AI startups at seed. Notably, this appears to be because seed funding for AI-Native firms in Canada is not (yet) significantly different than for other sectors, whereas US AI-Native firms are receiving larger rounds than other sectors; this means that the seed gap that exists for general startups (as shown in Figure 10) is magnified even further for AI-Native startups. (Series A rounds are too infrequent to allow meaningful comparison):
Fig 24: Average (median) Seed Round Size (M USD) for ‘AI Native’ startups
We can further examine seed rounds, distributing these by size and by category (AI versus other tech). The chart below shows that large rounds are more common in the US than in Canada:
Startup Genome | San Francisco • Berlin • London • Delhi • Tokyo • Abu Dhabi • Bangalore • São Paulo
p. 32
Powered by FlippingBook