Having spent many years as second fiddle to Barcelona, Madrid surpassed its Catalan cousin in 2023 with startups securing 605 million ( 672 million) investment above Barcelona's 457 million ( 507 million). "Lots of Latin American talent is arriving thanks to the recent entrepreneur visa and talent programs run by Telefonica to bring promising startup founders from Mexico, Argentina, Columbia and Venezuela," explains Bu Haces, innovation consultant at Madrid's Impact Hub. The city has seen solid growth in transportation, mobility and fintech startups during the last three years with AI and deep tech supercharged by an astonishing 56 universities. "The business schools in particular are providing lots of startup networking opportunities, and are keen on developing an entrepreneurial ecosystem," says Miguel Arias, general partner at VC K Fund. With Meta, IBM, Google and Amazon all expanding in the city, the main worry is lack of housing stock for the flood of students, engineers and entrepreneurs.

Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering key developments in AI research, industry, geopolitics and startups during January 2023. This one is a monster so it might get clipped in your inbox (read the online version in case!). Nathan wrote an oped in The Times for why university spinouts are a critical engine for our technology industry and why spinout policy needs urgent reform. The Times Higher Education profiled our open source data term database, spinout.fyi. Nathan commented on The Financial Times' Big Read on The growing tensions around spinouts at British universities. The State of AI Report provided two key figures to The Economist's piece on The race of the AI labs heats up. Register for next year's RAAIS, a full-day event in London that explores research frontiers and real-world applications of AI-first technology at the world's best companies. As usual, we love hearing what you're up to and what's on your mind, just hit reply or forward to your friends:-) BioNTech acquired London and Tunis-based AI startup InstaDeep for $680M (cash stock) - this was a huge deal.

For anyone who wants to get a piece of content they've created out there, the number of platforms and formats means it's not so simple as it used to be. GlossAi is a startup aiming to automate the process using (what else?) AI, and its approach of turning a half hour of content into an infinity of short clips and posts may not be palatable to everyone, investors are betting on the tech to the tune of $8 million seed round. There are already plenty of automatic editing and snipping tools out there, from big names like Adobe and generative AI startups like QuickVid. It wouldn't be accurate to say they've reached mainstream use (or perhaps even that they are ready for it), but the idea is certainly in circulation. Tel Aviv-based GlossAi sets itself apart by accomplishing a sort of middle road between purely generated stuff and intelligent clipping of your existing video.

It's no secret that the commercial application of NLP technologies has exploded in recent years. From chatbots and virtual assistants to machine translation and sentiment analysis, NLP technologies are now being used in a wide variety of applications across a range of industries. With the increasing demand for technologies that can process human language, investors have been eager to get a piece of the action. In this article, we look at NLP start-up funding over the past year, identifying the applications and domains that have received investment. A version of this article will appear in the Journal of Natural Language Engineering in early 2023.

This week, craft beer company Bira landed new funding to expand its geographic reach while Torr FoodTech grabbed $12 million for its unusual and tech-centric approach to snack bars. In agtech, Clarifruit also raised $12 million while more layoffs struck the food delivery sector. Craft beer maker Bira 91 lands $70 million round led by beer company Kirin. Bira will use the funding to build more breweries and expand geographical reach of the Bira line of beverages. Sustainable grocery startup Modern Milkman raises £50 million ($60 million) after Series C close.

Proteins are the molecules that get work done in nature, and there's a whole industry emerging around successfully modifying and manufacturing them for various uses. But doing so is time consuming and haphazard; Cradle aims to change that with an AI-powered tool that tells scientists what new structures and sequences will make a protein do what they want it to. The company emerged from stealth today with a substantial seed round. AI and proteins have been in the news lately, but largely because of the efforts of research outfits like DeepMind and Baker Lab. Their machine learning models take in easily collected RNA sequence data and predict the structure a protein will take -- a step that used to take weeks and expensive special equipment.

"Amsterdam is a global city--with a population of less than 1 million," says Ferdinand Goetzen, CEO of Amsterdam-based digital customer-insight business, Reveall. That, in a nutshell, is how Amsterdam has become a tech powerhouse, boasting unicorns such as Booking.com and Adyen, and an impressive crop of sustainability-focused startups. The city has the benefits of being medium sized--efficient public services, bikeability, and a tight-knit business community--but in the same breath, is instinctively outward-looking, dynamic, and business-friendly. Amsterdam's residents speak flawless English, its Schiphol Airport is the third-busiest in the EU, and, starting in 2020, the city gained a direct Eurostar link to London. As part of a business cluster known as the Randstad--which also includes Utrecht, the Hague, and Rotterdam, and is Europe's third region by productivity--it is unsurprising that Amsterdam's startup scene is thriving; it's tech companies are worth a total value of $230 billion as of July 2022, according to Dealroom. Let's get to know Amsterdam's movers and shakers.

"Barcelona has triumphed over Madrid as Spain's startup capital because of the deal flow and the talent," explains Miquel Martí, Tech Barcelona's CEO. "International talent is attracted by the lifestyle, the strength of the ecosystem, and the presence of international companies." According to Barcelona & Catalonia Startup Hub--the region's startup directory--there are over 1,900 startups in Catalonia, mostly concentrated in Barcelona; since 2016, the number has grown by over 75 percent. The city has long had a strong tradition of health-tech startups fueled by university and regional government collaboration, but successful founders have been funding, supporting, and starting other companies, as well as diversifying into construction, mobility, and sustainability. There's also been a slow trickle of fintech companies from London, lured by post-Brexit border-free banking, good weather, a lower cost of living--and the beach.

Quantum computers promise to perform some computations exponentially faster: Computations that may take a classical computer 10,000 years may run within hours on a quantum computer. Yet, building universal quantum computers turned out to be notoriously difficult. Current noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers are limited by the number of processing units, so-called qubits, and by noise – every step in a quantum computation adds a little error that accumulates until no calculation results can be obtained anymore. This severely limits the number of steps one can perform. The startup Kipu Quantum found a way to compress quantum algorithms, i.e. to arrive at the same result with fewer steps.

This is an edited, translated version of an article that originally appeared on September 20, 2022. Paretos is an AI-based software-as-a-service startup based in Heidelberg, Germany that Fabian Rang and Thorsten Heilig founded. Its platform helps companies use predictive data science to solve complex problems, removing the need to hire their own team of data scientists. It does this by using existing company data to create forecasts and impact analyses, helping companies make better business decisions. The company's website says that this is designed to allow "any business to benefit from cutting-edge AI technology just as the leading tech giants do."