2021 Top 50 most innovative start-ups.

I attended a virtual PowerBi workshop that got me thinking about the methodology that was used in the delivery of this particular workshop. In the first 30 minutes of the session there was some chaos with regards to the methodology used to deliver the contents of the workshop. All in all, the session yielded fruit with my first end-to-end visualization shared as below:

The visual looks into the a recent rating by Forbes on the top 50 most innovative firms in the United States in 2021. In the year 2021, venture capitalists poured $ 133 billion into Fintechs worldwide with the above listed firms forming only about 28% of the total funding. As a statistician, I could argue for completeness of the data that is, ideally access to the database from which the above results were polled from. This supports a wholistic view of how many firms and representative categories made it to the top 50, seeing that 9 out of 50 states in the USA made it to the listing. Additionally, it is vital to assess global inclusivity with further data on global coverage by the 50 listed firms.

The measure for innovativeness was ideally fintechs that were pandemic winners in terms of surges in valuations and migration to online platforms given most Americans moved to banking (financial inclusion) and shopping online. This led to either increased customers, market share or sales through the increased purchase of items (housing, cloud-based software, cyber-risk software or house items) to have a comfortable work from home experience by customers in America and across the globe. Some of the fintechs listed in the Forbes Top 50 also qualified as a result of going going public and debutting in the NASDAQ in 2020.

Fintech has had it tougher this year as consumers ventured out to shop and concerns about inflation, rising interest rates, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine spread. Crypto has plummeted, publicly traded fintech stocks have dropped 50%, and private markets have retreated as well, with venture capitalists warning of lower valuations and layoffs across the board, from payments to buy-now, pay-later businesses to crypto trading platforms. With fewer resources, entrepreneurs will have to make do–and innovate–with less. However, many great companies have been founded during difficult times.