Everyone has an opinion about the AI boom. We wanted a number.
The problem with vibes
Most claims about AI company formation come from funding databases, which only see companies once investors do. That misses the long tail: the two-person consultancy in Cork, the automation studio in Tallinn, the compliance startup in Singapore that bootstrapped for three years.
Company registers see all of them, on day one.
What we did
We pulled formation records from 35 national registers and counted companies that put AI in their name. Then we did the boring work that makes the number defensible:
- Survivorship testing. Registers delete or archive dead companies at different rates. We corrected for it.
- Denominators. A rise in AI-named companies means nothing if all company formation rose. 21 registers gave us full denominators.
- Name discipline. "Aidan's Plumbing" is not an AI company. Our matching rules are in the methodology.
What we found
About 1 in 200 new companies in the UK and Ireland were AI-named by 2025, a several-fold rise since ChatGPT, with a shared inflection in 2023 visible on almost every register we checked.
Read the full census, or explore any of the 23 country reports from the research page.