June 15, 2021 4 minutes read

Wizikey, like the previous year, releases its pioneering visibility index report but adding this time a global twist. Using our data-driven prowess and well-researched metrics – Wizikey’s Newsmaker Report 2021 brings out a global edition commencing with one of the prime South-Asian countries, i.e, Singapore. 

With this, we bring you the list of the topmost startups of Singapore that have scored the best in terms of their brand media presence when the world was and still is, grappling with the effects of the pandemic and its aftermath. Sailing through all the adversaries, these startups have worked hard to stay relevant to their stakeholders and create value within their ecosystem and in turn, reaped rich rewards in the form of earned media value.

Wizikey is Asia’s first media intelligence and outreach company that helps businesses build trust across the world. The report reflects the response of companies to the unprecedented upheaval and how they have managed to communicate it. 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 Billionaires, The Entertainers, and The Online Traders 

2021 brings you those startups which have shown sustenance as well as unprecedented growth during the year 2020-2021 and belong to a broad spectrum of business trends and industries. 

Beginning with…


The Billionaires – These are those elite members who have either touched the mark of being the unicorns or are steps away from being the one. In this category, the startup leading has been “Grab”. Grab Holdings Inc., commonly known as Grab, is a Singaporean multinational company headquartered in Singapore whose business ranges from transportation and food delivery to digital payments services. According to the latest news, it has been named the first decacorn startup in the SA region with a valuation of more than $10 billion. Apart from Grab, we have a homegrown startup, Carousell, at a striking distance from entering the unicorn club with its green consumerism and profitable acquisition. With a year filled with disruptions and failures, Carousell stood the test of time and gained enough popularity among the media masses to remain in the top 10.

The Entertainers – In this category, only one name comes up,i.e, “One Championship”. The sports media property based in Singapore and which mainly promotes mixed martial arts and kickboxing events have been active since 2011. Its stint during the pandemic-prone months has been tremendous and generated most of the media attraction for its MMA tournament during the winter season. This came as a mode of respite from the mundane quarantine and the year-long stay-at-home policy adopted worldwide. The viewership during those months was the highest for 2020 broadcast hours despite the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, including a span of nearly three months without live global events.

The Online Traders – This is in short means the E-Commerce startups. The year 2020 to 2021 saw the upheaval of the eCommerce industry ranging from online food delivery to other domestic essentials. Not only this, the fashion and apparel industry used the online platform quite effectively and made news for its technologically backed retail business. Zalora and Qoo10 are some of the key names that appeared on the list. Even the property and real estate business shifted to internet mode with PropertyGuru leading the way for changing the traditional real-estate sector to AI/Tech-enabled domain. 

Notable Mentions – 

Some startups performed superbly and were high rankers although they belonged to a different industry. One of them is “Sunseap” – a solar energy company in Singapore that garnered quite good media attention. Sunseap’s motto for clean energy drive and its focus on photovoltaic farms made a tremendous impact with the publication houses. Others like Stashaway, Validus, and Funding Societies made their presence in the fintech domain but the era of Singapore startups belonged to e-Commerce companies.

Top Three Rankers

Metric-wise key players

Top 10 Startups Of Singapore

Methodology for this report

Hottest Startups of 2021 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 500K + news articles crawled over a period of April 2020 – April 2021, are used for analysis in this report
  • These articles are spread across 50+ distinct publications.
  • We have considered the top 50 Singapore  Startups out of which the best performing 25 were selected.
  • 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 while. 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 25 Newsmakers badge, write to us at [email protected]!
If you would like to download your copy, simply click here Global Newsmaker Report – Singapore