The UK is now third in the world for artificial intelligence (AI) investment, behind the US and China, after attracting more capital in six months than in all of 2018.

AI investment in the UK reached £859.29m in that time, compared with £825.85m in the preceding 12 months, according to figures collected by business information resource Crunchbase.

The figures show that the UK’s AI sector is now in its fifth year of consecutive growth, with investment increasing almost six-fold between 2014 and 2018.

The growth has predominately been fuelled by startups with 50 or fewer employees, which account for 89% of the UK’s AI ecosystem.

According to representatives from entrepreneurs network Tech Nation, the focus now needs to be on scaling the UK’s existing AI business to capitalise on these investment trends.

“For the UK to maintain its authority in AI, we need to nurture scalable, globally competitive, homegrown AI companies that solve real problems,” said Harry Davies, applied AI lead at Tech Nation.

“Yet, the pool of AI-focused companies that achieve this beyond Series A remains slim, despite the hype, and the path to scale is uniquely challenging.”

For comparison, Chinese AI companies tend to have larger workforces, with 53% having more than 50 employees.

This is important to note because, as angel investor Ian Hogarth points out in his blog, there are “perhaps 700 people in the world who can contribute to the leading edge of AI research, and perhaps 70,000 who can understand their work and participate actively in commercialising it”.

Given that the Chinese government is rolling out incentives to attract AI talent, as well as the fact that an ever-higher percentage of AI research papers are coming from China, the UK still faces a battle to build on its position despite the high investment figures.