The term artificial intelligence refers to the faculty, possessed by a non-human entity, to carry out operations emulating intellectual human capabilities. The interest in this technology began during the second half of the twentieth century but has never fully expressed its economic value. With the evolution of science and availability of high computing capabilities, large amounts of data, investors, AI scientists and AI friendly policies finally the artificial intelligence industry is revealing its economic and technological potential. Venture capitalists understood the business possibilities well in advance and started to finance a large number of start-ups; from the Crunchbase database were extracted for each year and country, the number of companies creating AI solutions that are funded by VCs or business angels; a regression analysis was then carried out to understand what were the main factors, divided into three big clusters: entrepreneurial, governmental and labour market, which allowed these companies to be funded..