You’re not imaging the AI craze: The number of successfully funded startups with “.ai” in their URL has skyrocketed in 2015 and 2016, according to CB Insights, a venture capital research firm.
“It is clear that 9 of 10 investors have very little idea what A.I. is so if you’re a founder raising money, you should sprinkle some A.I. into your pitch deck,” CB Insights wrote in a recent blog post. “Use of ‘artificial intelligence,’ ‘AI,’ ‘chatbot,’ or ‘bot’ are winners right now and might get you a little valuation bump or get the process to move quicker.”
The VC research firm also found that the .co and .io suffixes have been trendy in the past six years. In 2010, no startups were using the .io suffix—by 2015, there were 100 successfully funded companies using it.