44% of the Forbes Top 25 Machine Learning startups are on a .AI domain name

As someone that’s run a machine learning startup for eight years I can tell you, there are a lot more of us now than when we started Bold Metrics. There are a lot of reasons for this, some of it has to do with advancements in cloud computing thanks to competition between Amazon, GCP and Azure, another is Data Science bootcamps that are helping people move from software engineer to data scientist.

That being said, I think the biggest single shift in favor of machine learning is a general understanding and acceptance of it by both companies and people. Ten years ago the idea that a computer would be learning from data and making predictions seemed too good to be true. I can still remember when we first launched we heard, “but doesn’t machine learning really work?” all the time, now, companies that aren’t leveraging machine learning are finding themselves behind the competition.

Startups that leverage machine learning are everywhere now solving a myriad of problems but a new trend that’s caught on only in the last few years is the adoption of the .AI domain name. Even five years ago very few companies were using .AI domains, now, look at Forbes’ top 25 Machine Learning Startups for 2020 and 44% are branding on a .AI domain name.

Here’s the full list of .AI startups mentioned in the article:

Another interesting TLD that I also think is going to see some growth over the next few years is .ML. One .ML startup made the list this time around – Comet.ml but my guess is we’ll see more making lists like these very soon. I feel like .ML came out of nowhere – honestly I had no idea it existed until a couple of weeks ago, I’ll need to do some research to understand this extension a bit more…and of course I’ll share what I find.

For now it’s clear .AI is seeing some pretty darn meaningful growth, the awareness is there. While I’m sure some of these companies will end up with their exact-match .COM in the future, it will be interesting to see how many stick with .AI for the long haul. Either way, these startupsare kicking ass and taking names and I’m happy to have them out there championing machine learning!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton