What are your predictions for 2024 Indian Startup ecosystem?
While there are lot of VCs coming out with their ‘expert’ outlook on 2024, let’s be real to share our own predictions. Idea is to share and learn and not just mudsling.
Let me go first with few of my own
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Neobanking will go belly up - it’s really hard to make money in just Savings account led neobanking I believe. With lending increasingly difficult, I think we will see likes of Jupiter going belly up
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Gold mine of climate tech - climate tech will become more mainstream stream (similar to content and community in 2021, D2C in 2022 and SaaS in 2023)
What are yours?
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Grapevine will get acquired 🙌🏻
Aapke muh main ghee shakkar
And ppl will leave this platform and LinkedIn junta will take over this place
Consumer-tech will be hot once again. Many AI-focused startup’s will pop up in this space. Larger players (like Meta, Amazon, AirBnB, Netflix) will go on an M&A spree acquiring companies for their tech. Not sure if this will play out in India.
In India, any consumer/D2C idea will still remain hot as VCs realise that safest way to make money in India is from consumer. However, platform companies which are capex heavy like q-commerce will not be hot.
Fintech (regulations) and ed-tech ( hard to keep selling dreams of cracking competitive exams) will slow down.
Building SaaS in India and selling to the US will get decimated.
Lots of PE activity that will lead to traditional family businesses/manufacturing firms modernising (maybe not 2024 but next 5 years).
Smaller VCs will pop up who will bet on founders with unconventional backgrounds (non-IIT/IIM) and moonshot ideas such as climate tech.
Biggest hit will be taken by your traditional early-stage VC firms who were thesis driven and were backing non-risky traditional founders. You can already see this playing out. These VCs nowadays only fund founders with 5+ years of industry experience which shows a lack of risk appetite.
Stagnation of hiring. AI tools adoption at org level.
Dollars raised by startups will either go to the mega cloud provider, for ads and LLM model.
More closures…
Intersting. Found your post from the other Jupiter post. Can you elaborate on the climate tech startups? Did we see meaningful traction in Q1 24? Climate tech in India seems not very aligned with our macro priority (probably not top of mind for most?)