StartupBlink has just released the 2020 edition of its Startup Ecosystem Rankings Report, which encompasses 1,000 cities and 100 countries across the world.
StartupBlink’s algorithm analyzes tens of thousands of data points. Data is coming from the company’s community of 50,000 members as well as from such partners as CrunchBase, SEMrush, Meetup, and Coworker. The ranking is based on criteria related to the quantity, the quality and the business environment of each ecosystem at the country or city level.
Unsurprisingly, the US leads the country ranking, far ahead of any other country. Then come the UK, Israel and Canada, immediately followed by a range of European countries. Among them is Russia, ranked 17th, down from 15th place in the 2019 ranking.
Russia is ahead of South Korea (19th), Brazil (20th), Japan (21st) and India (23rd) – but behind Estonia (11th), France (12th), Finland (13th) and China (14th).
In the city ranking (dominated, unsurprisingly, by San Francisco and its area), Moscow does not do bad at the 9th place, up from 10th in last year’s ranking. The Russian capital is well behind New York, London, Los Angeles and Boston, but not that far from Beijing, Tel Aviv and Berlin.
“Moscow’s startup ecosystem surprised us with an outstanding amount of technical talent,” StartupBlink writes.
The report also underlines the city’s “special R&D potential in AI and Big Data,” and considers it to be “a center of creativity in Europe.”
Also noteworthy are the development of accelerators and coworking spaces, and the performance of such tech companies as Yandex, Youdo and Genotek.
The role of local public initiatives like the Moscow Innovation Cluster, the Moscow Accelerator program and the Innovation Pilot Program, is also singled out.
The latter program enables companies from all over the world to test smart city solutions in Moscow’s urban environment.
In spite of the current international tensions, the promoters of the ecosystem, such as the Moscow Agency of Innovations, “continue their effort to connect it to the world.”
Local data gaps
While StartupBlink’s global data collection and analysis tools seems unparalleled, the company’s founder Eli David concedes that data gaps remain.
“The analysis of some countries is more detailed than others due to our varied knowledge of each country’s ecosystem,” he says.
This may lead to a certain bias when comparing the performance of several cities or countries. For example, China’s exceptional performance in the latest report does not only reflect the fast development of its startup ecosystem, but also StartupBlink’s increasing data collection capacity in the country.
These gaps may be closed soon by developing ties with even more ecosystem developers, David says.
This year, StartupBlink added a few additional chapters to its report. One of them is a COVID–19 Innovation Section prepared in cooperation with UNAIDS, which features more than a thousand innovative companies on a global COVID–19 Innovation Map.
Covid-related projects are presented in different categories, such as potential vaccines, prevention innovations, diagnostics, treatments, grants, and lifestyle adaptation.
