Top 5 Startups In 2013

By Edoardo Moreni - December, 28th 2013

The top 5 startups is the list we used before choosing Snapchat as the best startup in 2013. Although every startup that innovates should be nominated as the best of the year, there are always those with great valuations, massive investments that have impacted even people who don’t even know the differences between Java and Objective-C. Those startups are the ones we have been talking about for the whole year or for the last few months, those are the top 5 startups in 2013.

#1 - Snapchat

Snapchat has been already nominated the best startup of 2013. The work that the team behind this simple app has done in the last year was massive. Further the three key factors on which we have focused on deeply - valuation, interactions and hotness - are unique.

In the same way the total funding received by this single startup, which is over $123 million, is not something you see every day in Silicon Valley. What Snapchat has to prove now is if this is just speculation or there is something real behind it.

If they are able to make it as a successful business we’ll probably talk about them in the next five years, otherwise they’ll disappear forever, but with a couple of millions in their pockets. I think it might be an interesting journey for anyone, but being an entrepreneur is about building something and make it sustainable; it’s not about speculating and failing. Hopefully the dot com bubble is way ahead from us, but there are still people who are missing those periods.

Funding Total: $123M

#2 - Tinder

Tinder is “The Thing”. The guys behind Tinder took a simple concept, which was already developed on the internet, and used it to build a dating app from scratch. The result was massive, since the ability to rate and date people is so easy, it has become more than a dating app.

I would probably define it as a challenge. People want to know if they are hot or not, that’s why they log with their Faceook profile by just adding their name and five pictures. Are they going to date anyone? Who knows, what counts here is if the ratio between males and females is fair enough to maintain the social experience on both sides.

After having used the app for more than a month, I can assure you that it actually works in this way. There could even be more girls on the service, but that’s something that only the team knows. Are they making money? No, but as math has proved, there is still time for that.

#3 - Coinbase

If you thought Bitcoin was complicated, Coinbase is here to make it simple and accessible to anyone. With Coinbase, users can buy and sell bitcoins for US $ using their United States bank account. The company currently holds more than 600,000 bitcoin wallets with raising figures.

What makes them unique is that they have recently raised $25 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz. It was the biggest round ever in a bitcoin based startup. As reported in May 2013, the company was processing more than $15 million bitcoin transactions per month. In December 2013, the website had more than 500,000 users.

Funding Total: $31.7M

#4 - Bitstrips

Do you know when you fund a company back in 2007 and six years later you raise $3 million? That’s Bitstrips that has recently released its app in October 2013 and in two weeks reached the first spot for free apps on the Apple Store (with no advertising or promotion).

Life is strange, but the way we are connected in 2013 helps people distribute interesting ideas easily. With Bitsrips you can design a cartoon version of yourself and your friends and share it. The spread of a simple concept has impressed us in the last two months by filling every facebook’s newsfeed of people in the range of 18-25.

Funding Total: $3M

#5 - Vine

Vine was another app we have talked about in the last year. Introducing the concept of a six seconds video on a new social network that you have created on purpose is not something that everyone would like to do. However they turned to be a disruptive startup with an innovative idea.

After being acquired from Twitter for $30 million, the app has debuted as a free iOS app on the Apple Store in January. The diffusion of the app forced Facebook to copy the idea and introduce Instagram Videos by doubling the length up 15 seconds.

Acquired: $30M