Smart city startups: state of the art

This thesis investigates the global landscape of smart city startups, with the focus on startups founded from 2020 onwards and the most recent funding in 2022 or later. The primary research question addresses the current state of the art of smart city startups worldwide with a comprehensive database with over 800 startups extracted using targeted queries of Smart City domains. Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative analysis the startups were sorted into appropriate sectors and applications fields before being analysed for identification of geographical and sectoral trends along with a comparison of funding. To deepen the understanding behind some of the trends, the impacts of policies and regional initiatives along with innovation hotspots and the technological advancements are discussed further. The findings reveal a heavily dominated presence of startups from the United States in all sectors while Europe as a whole has the upper hand in a few sectors and the presence of India is also significant with the second highest total of startups observed, only behind the US. A number of case studies are presented to demonstrate the broad range of application fields which the Smart City ecosystem is comprised of.

No italian abstract