Wizikey Newsmakers | Hottest Startups of 2020 report

Through the Hottest Startups of 2020 report, Wizikey celebrates and recognizes the 100 most influential startups in India, who have redefined the ecosystem in 2020 through the sheer quantum, consistency, spread, and sentiment of their strategic communication efforts in media. While the avenues to stay in people’s minds have increased over time, “Earned Media” plays a major role in enhancing the reputation of one’s brand, in fact, now more than ever.

Wizikey is Asia’s first media intelligence and outreach company that helps businesses build trust across the world. The report takes a look at the unprecedented upheaval witnessed in different sectors; some which lead the way in the most uncertain times and also those which were mysteriously quiet during this period. Further, Wizikey’s data-driven approach has highlighted those leaders in the ecosystem who created their mark in a certain industry by lighting the way for others in what was otherwise a year of uncertainty through an in-depth analysis.

Overall Highlights – The Beautiful, The Leaders, The Last One Standing, and What’s Missing

The year 2020 has been the year of pivots, sustenance, and securing the runway for emerging businesses. Startups have understood the need to think of crisis-proof business models and are also innovating each day to survive the outcome of the pandemic. Wizikey brings to you an in-depth analysis:

The Beautiful: Standing out and building positivity for the world were beauty e-commerce players – Nykaa and Purplle, followed by the edtech sector – where players like Vedantu kindled rays of hope in a locked-down world.

Auto overall saw a resurrection this year for not just making a revival post-Diwali but also the models that found more acceptance, after the ride-hailing boom in the years before 2020. EVs received much love in the year making way to B2B adoption, with players like Ather Energy and Ola Electric.

The Leaders: Almost all Unicorns bear the torch and bring more limelight for their respective sectors. Sectoral leaders include the #1 ranked startup.

Last one standing: While the world was abuzz with fintech, enterprise tech, logistics, and edtech bringing more faith and hope for survival; players like OYO, Urban Company, Ather Energy, Shuttl, and Medgenome roughed up their way ahead, most of them hanging loosely on low sentiment whether declaring massive layoffs or announcing IPOs in the pandemic-driven world.

What’s missing in the Hottest startups: The year 2020 missed out on seeing more buzz and finding its footing in the world of Biotech, Spacetech, and finding more buzz for innovative and young manufacturing startups. 

Sector Wonders

Rank 1: Fintech

Truly, 2020 can be called the year of fintech, due to a strong wave of UPI and wallet payments that took over both metro and non-metro cities. The rise in demand for cashless transactions due to norms like social distancing paved the way for the transformation of B2B and B2C models. 

• Paytm was the only fintech startup in Wizikey Top list. 
• CRED was the youngest player on the list.
• Clear Tax was the most positive brand on our list.
• AGS Transact Technologies and OfBusiness were surprise players.

Rank 2: B2C E-commerce

Transforming overnight to match the demand and supply for 1.3 billion Indians, the cohort of companies that emerged as heroes of the changing consumer world is the B2C E-commerce sector. 

• BigBasket is leading this list as it ranks as the most trusted brand in India through its strong messaging in the media for contactless delivery initiatives and ensuring customer safety.
• News sentiment is high for FirstCry and PepperFry, solving for probably the most critical needs in a locked-down economy. 
• The Surprise entrant in the top 25, at spot 15 is Grofers, largely due to the brand being abuzz for various aspects.

Rank 3: Enterprise Tech

The pandemic challenged every organization – big and small, and the enterprise tech sector won. These companies showed direction and made some fantastic buzz on how to adapt to the new normal.

• Freshworks led this space for providing SaaS customer engagement solutions. 
• Interesting names in this include Nxtra Data, ThoughtSpot, and  MetricStream.

Rank 4: Logistics

With essentials and supply chains becoming the drivers of the economy especially during the lockdown period, the logistics sector saw an unprecedented boom.  

• Dunzo, at spot number 23, is the surprise entry. Keeping a high sentiment, it was recognized widely by consumer audiences
• Two Unicorns feature in this category – Delhivery and Rivigo, buoyed by the sentiment they brought to the market.

Rank 5: EdTech

What a year it was for this category that reimagined itself to match up to the demand of education via the digital medium. The sentiment stayed high across players bringing hope in an otherwise dreary post-COVID-19 world. 

• Byjus and Unacademy at 8 and 10 rank take the hotspots in the category. 
• Vedantu emerged as the most positive brand
• The surprise element is White Hat Jr which had a positive overall sentiment.

Click here to get the complete in-depth report!

Insights into the Hottest Startups of 2020 Report

Wizikey has derived insights at three different levels of granularity:

1. Overall top rankers and reasons for their success
2. Industry-wise performance of top startups
3. Within each industry, the top performers

Metrics-wise Key Players

Top 20 Unicorns and Startups  

Here is a quick look at the top 5 startups and unicorns of 2020

Rank 1: Paytm

Paytm emerged as the hottest startup of the year 2020 because of consistency in putting strong messages in the media. It generated the highest news volume across all startups and the most consistent newsmaker.

Rank 2: Dream11

Dream11 grabbed the most headlines and had the second-highest number of articles. IPL sponsorship made sure it remained in the news for an extended period of time. 

Rank 3: Zomato

The food delivery giant, Zomato was covered by most journalists and had a good sentiment score. The message of ‘safety’ took center stage in an unpredictable year.

Rank 4: Ola

Ola was covered by the most number of distinct publications amongst all startups. Ola with its ‘Ride Safe India’ campaign committed to ensuring safe travel.

Rank 5: Swiggy

Swiggy was achieved similar numbers and quality to those covering the first 3 ranks. Swiggy launched an asset-light low investment model ‘Brand Works’ aimed at co-creating brands with its restaurant partners.

You can download the complete Top 100 Hottest Startups of 2020 report here

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Methodology for this report

Hottest Startups of 2020 is a report that has been created with the help of Wizikey’s proprietary AI and ML technology, data mining, and analysis among startups and unicorns.

• A total of 5 million news articles crawled over the year, have been used for analysis in this report

• These articles are spread across 500+ distinct publications.

• We have considered the top 100 Startups and Unicorns

• Wizikey has extensively studied the data and has applied NLP, data mining, text analytics, and relevant statistical concepts to formulate the data points that we present in this report.

The Wizikey Newsmakers Report takes a research-based approach to analyze and understand the sentiment of various sectors over a period of time. It is a good reference point for companies to understand their position in news articles and to also glance through the same for their competition in the same sphere.

To collect your Wizikey Top 100 Newsmaker badge, write to us at newsmaker@wizikey.com!

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