3 spaces to watch in India next year for emerging startups – food, fintech, and content

Entrepreneur-turned-investor Sid Talwar is one of the partners at Lightbox, a VC fund which made early bets in startups like InMobi, Cleartrip, and MapMyIndia.

Strapped in? Ready to go? Because 2015 is going to be a tech infused tornado! I’m bracing myself. I predict unprecedented growth when it comes to anytime, anywhere, ecommerce.

2014 was one of the most prolific years we’ve had in terms of the number of startups, fundings, valuations, and user growth in India. In 2015, we should see the fruits of that labor in several spaces – look out for many fledgling companies to mature and grow at a pace we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago, or even just a year ago.

Many companies will come out winners, but there are a few spaces that I’m most excited to monitor for the next year. Mainly because I was skeptical about them 12 months ago and they’ve really started making me a believer.

Food – from finding to ordering, to eating, to rating, to cooking

They’re all here and in a big way. From grocery plays, to food ordering, to food delivery. And as a consumer – I’m loving it. Sure, there are hiccups and there are service issues but nothing that can’t be ironed out with money and time.

Let me be honest – I was quite skeptical of a lot of these plays 12 months ago. Online grocery players, for example – I wasn’t sure how one would differ from another. Would consumers just go to the one that gave them the best deal that day and not care about the brand?

Every time they entered a new city, the whole network seemed like it needed to be re-created. And I think the biggest question for me was: how formidable a competitor the offline market experience was, convenience-wise, perishable-items-wise, selection-wise and so on.

Today, I’m a user. And I’m quite a satisfied user. I like the convenience, the selection and the savings. And this is one area where mobile and data are going to have a huge impact. Lots of money is being thrown here and I’m very excited to see how it gets used.

Ditto for the food ordering and delivery space. I had two big concerns entering the year. One was whether the restaurants would play along. You’re so dependent on the very fragmented and “non-tech-oriented” mom and pop food players in this space and they can be so undependable. And if something goes wrong, the consumer ends up blaming you and not the restaurant! You see this happening in ecommerce marketplaces in the country all the time. “I ordered a phone and got a brick”. Here it’s very plausible that the food you ordered never gets delivered. Or it comes two hours later and now you’ve already eaten something else. How do you solve that? There’s no singular answer to that, but I’m starting to hop on to the “it will solve itself through the very mechanics of a marketplace” bandwagon.

Two, the logistics are complex AND the expectation in terms of delivery time is high. I’m not ready to wait 24 hours for food. I might not be ready to wait two hours for food or even one hour. But again, I’ve become a user of both services – and a believer in the need for the services and the potential that comes from them.