The number of registered AI start-up firms increased by over than 50 per cent globally in 2016 – with funding almost doubling to $9.89bn during the same period. According to market analysts and research firm Venture Scanner, since March last year, the number of registered AI firms has risen globally from 957 to 1,535 across 71 different countries. Categories covered in its findings include businesses involved in; computer vision / image recognition, computer vision / image recognition, context aware computing, deep learning, machine learning, gesture control, natural language procession, personalised recommendation engines, smart robots, speech recognition, speech to speech translation, video automatic content recognition and virtual assistants. Venture Scanner claims of the 1,535 companies tracked, 731 of them have received funding, totalling $9.89 billion - up from $4.8 billion a year earlier. Venture Scanner has also revealed that the US currently leads the way for AI start-up companies, with more than 740 registered.