YikYak Wins Fastest Rising Startup At 8th Annual Crunchies Awards

In the tech world, few things matter as much as growth. At the end of the day, it’s all about grabbing the biggest possible slice of the pie.

At the 8th Annual Crunchies Awards, we’re recognizing the startups who took 2014 by storm, rising from oblivion to become household names.

The winner of the Fastest Rising Category is YikYak, and the runner up is Slack.

The nominees are:

Lending Club, a peer-to-peer lending network, blew 2014 apart. The company went public in December with shares popping 56 percent in its first day.

Product Hunt came into fashion in 2014, as well, offering a single place for tech enthusiasts and early adopters to post their favorite new apps, services and products. I mean, you could theoretically use TechCrunch for that (wink wink), but we’re happy to have the company of a startup as cool as Product Hunt.

Reddit has been around for quite a while, but the ‘front page of the internet’ had a big year in 2014. The company tackled some of the biggest obstacles its ever seen, like the Fappening and some changes to the leadership team.

Slack, a startup that people will absolutely not shut up about, is taking over the enterprise collaboration space, fighting off bigger names like Convo and Yammer with a potentially superior product.

And finally, Yik Yak broke out during 2014 offering an alternative to anonymish services like Secret and Whisper by focusing on proximity.

All five startups deserve their nomination in this category. Congratulations to each of them.