Tech Scaleup Silicon Valley – 2022 Report
Silicon Valley is the global epicenter of innovation. We don’t need a report to state that. With that being said, there are some questions that need proper data to be answered.
How large is the gap between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world? Will there ever be another Silicon Valley? Is Silicon Valley losing its edge? What are current Silicon Valley’s tech bets?
In seeking to address these (and other) questions, Mind the Bridge dug further into the Crunchbase database to try and collect more data points and trends. The result is our new report “Tech Scaleup Silicon Valley” which was presented on October 17th at the Opening of the Scaleup Summit, San Francisco. The extended benefit of this process is that we have adopted the same methodology to map the rest of the world. The outcome is the possibility to benchmark all of the world’s ecosystems with Silicon Valley and track evolution patterns.
Here are some of the report’s highlights:
– Silicon Valley confirms its supremacy as the world’s disruptor.
– Silicon Valley hosts over 9 thousand scaleups. Elsewhere, it takes an entire continent or country such as Europe or China to provide similar figures. Silicon Valley has about 4 times more scaleups than Israel (the so-called “Startup Nation”). The gap is even wider in terms of investments. Scaleups headquartered in the Bay Area raised approx. $700 billion in capital, which is about half of the total capital made available to US scaleups. This is double the amount raised by their European counterparts and 7 times higher than Israel.
Relax. There is no other Silicon Valley in sight. The tired narrative of ‘the next Silicon Valley’ has become outdated. Planners from all over the world trying to replicate the secret sauce of the Bay Area had limited success. No ecosystem realistically has the possibility to close the gap with Silicon Valley and reach the density levels of the Bay Area. That said, as Sam Altman correctly points out, there will likely be 30+ clusters in different places able to get beyond critical mass.
Are startups leaving Silicon Valley? More and more tech startups are leaving California. Behind this choice, are several factors: the first being the insane cost of living. Large companies have made the leap as well.
Does it mean that a democratization of tech hubs is taking place across the US? Although New York, Los Angeles County area, Boston and Cambridge, Austin (and Texas in general), Seattle, Atlanta, Chicago, and the North Carolina tech triangle have all emerged as alternative centers of innovation, our data confirms that the Bay’s dominance still looks formidable. Investments in Silicon Valley scaleups are 3.6 times higher than in New York, 7 times more than Boston/Cambridge, over 10 times more than in LA and Austin, and 30+ times more than the other hubs.
Emerging tech trends? More deep and transversal. Silicon Valley tech scaleups are increasingly focusing on the development of deep, cross-cutting technologies and becoming more vertical-agnostic. Looking at the recently founded fast growing scaleups, 25% develop Artificial Intelligence technologies. Security, Cloud, and Blockchain do follow. Predominant areas of application are Health, Finance, Mobility and Energy.
In closing: while 2022 is shaping up as a year of slow down of the global innovation economy (to which extents is still hard to predict) one data point is pretty clear: Silicon Valley remains the undisputed north star for both quality and quantity of the innovation throughput in the world.