Analysis of Startup Industry as of June-2021
This analyis will provide you the insights into the startup industry especially that rare sub-section of the industry which consists of those companies which has ≥ $1 billion valuation (aka unicorns) as per the latest funding rounds.
Data Source: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gpVrEm7drLkwutlK7A_T7lacob10cXmI/view?usp=sharing
Source-Code: https://github.com/strikersps/Exploratory-Data-Analysis/tree/main/Analysis-of-Startups-As-of-June-2021
NOTE: Data is extracted from the article published on the CB Insights website and saved into a .csvfile, as data on the website gets frequently updated/reconciled over time.
Please view this article in Desktop mode rather than Mobile to view all the visualization correctly.
Unicorns are private companies/startups which has achieved a valuation of ≥ $1 billion. They can be further classified into Decacorns i.e. startups that had ≥ a $10 billion valuation and Hectocorns i.e. startups that had ≥ $100 billion valuations.
As of June-2021, there are at least 700 startups all around the world as reported by CB Insights, out of which almost 95.02% have a valuation of < $10 Billion.
ByteDance is the only startup in the whole world that has a valuation > $100 billion, i.e. $140 billion, followed by Stripe with a valuation of $95 billion followed by SpaceX with a valuation of $74 billion.
If you compare the most valuable startup today with the most valuable public company of 1989 i.e. Industrial Bank of Japan from the market cap perspective, there is a significant difference in the valuation and also most of the valuable companies approximately 30 years ago were in the banking sector, but that’s not the case in the 21st century.
You can see an exponential amount of development which had happened in the last three or so decades and how technology had played a very pivotal part in those innovations which had not only made the quality of life better but also significantly improved the economic output and opened up new opportunities.
The above pie charts show the distribution of the startups according to country, city or metro, and industry-wise. It is clear that almost 61.44% of startups exist in the United States of America, followed by China (25.16%) and then India (5.39%).
From a city or metro perspective, distribution is among the top cities in the world which consists of San Francisco, New York, Beijing, Shanghai, and London, and these cities are also one of the biggest contributors to the GDP of the respective economy.
The below treemap gives you a way of looking at the startup distribution on a geographical basis in a more detailed and interactive way.
One thing you will notice is that although the startups have a global footprint, they are all concentrated in a specific set of cities like in India ≥ 60% of the startups are in Bangalore, Gurgaon, and Mumbai rather than having a presence across the country.
From an industry perspective, the top industry/sectors which the startups are targeting are FinTech, Internet Software & Services, E-Commerce and D2C, Artificial Intelligence, and Healthcare. This distribution may change in the post-pandemic era, where I think Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare will dominate, but one common thing among all these industries will be: every single one of them will be driven by technology-based innovations.
The education sector has only one startup with a valuation of $2.4 billion, i.e. Duolingo in the United States, which is strange given that the Education industry has a lot of problems that can be solved and is also a lucrative industry. Except for the United States, which by the way have only one startup, no other country has a billion-dollar valued startup in this industry.
The following pie chart gives a detailed outlook about which country has the maximum number of startups targeting the top-6 industries according to the above bar chart.
The below treemap visualization allows you to look at all the startups globally from an industry/sector perspective independent of geography in a more detailed and interactive way.
The total value of all the startups with a valuation of ≥ $1 billion globally is approximately $2.3 Trillion, with the most value contributed by the United States of America (approx. $1.2 Trillion) followed by China (approx. $518 Billion) and then India (approx. $115 Billion).
Although there is a significant difference between the cumulative valuation of startups from a country perspective, the significant gap between the top-3 is going to narrow down as there will be more startups in the coming years due to the push towards solving some of the most important problems with the top priority being climate change and how we can reduce our carbon footprint by migrating towards renewable energy sources, favorable government policies and technology is going to play a major role in not only solving those problems but also in improving the quality of life which in turn will improve the economic output further.
The following pie-charts give a more detailed outlook on the distribution of startups in top-5 countries (according to the above bar-chart) from a city or metro and industry perspective.
From the above the pie-charts it is clear that the industry distribution is not same for all the top-5 countries with an interesting case of Israel where most of the valuable startups are targeting the Cybersecurity industry (38.46%) followed by Artificial Intelligence (30.77%) and then FinTech (15.38%).
When we look at the distribution of those startups which has a valuation of ≥ $10 billion then it tells us a different story especially from the industry perspective when compared to distribution (refer to above pie-chart) of startups that have a valuation < $10 billion.
Most of the decacorns are present in FinTech (39.13%) followed by Internet Software & Services (17.39%), Auto & Transportation (17.39%), Hardware (13.04%), and Other (13.04%) industries which tell us that pattern doesn’t remain the same as it was when we have considered all the startups irrespective of their valuation or only the startups having < $10 billion valuations. It’s mainly due to either bankruptcy or reduction in valuation or merger & acquisition by other public/private companies.
The following treemap shows the distribution of the decacorns by geography in a more detailed and interactive way.
Change in industry distribution also tells us about the volatility in valuations of startups in different industries or sectors even though the most valuable startup i.e. ByteDance does have a valuation of $140 billion which operates in the Artificial Intelligence industry but the industry itself doesn’t have a significant number of decacorns rather most of the startups have a valuation of < $10 Billion which you can observe from the tree-map and the following bar plot.
The following treemap shows the distribution of the decacorns from an industry perspective irrespective of geography in a more detailed and interactive way.
Conclusion: From the analysis, we can say that the future of the startup industry is going to be driven by those companies which are solving some of the most important problems using technology as it allows us to do more with less, ratcheting up our fundamental capabilities to a higher level.
As Peter Thiel in his book Zero To One said:
Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system, the next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine and the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys you aren’t learning from them.
It's not globalization that takes the world from 0 to 1 rather it's innovation, driven by technology which takes the world from 0 to 1.
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