The Realm of Mobile & Digital Health to Seize the New Wave of Investment Date:   Monday , July 20, 2015 Founded in 2012, India Quotient is an investment firm that backs early staged technology start-ups that are still discovering a revenue model, pricing, product or strategy. 1) What are the trends of investment in 2015? The last 18 months have been exciting for the start-up eco-system, which would be an understatement, given the activity it has witnessed. The famous Series A crunch debated a while back is no more while already there is skepticism of bubble along with the euphoria of funding news of start-ups on a daily basis. At Indian Quotient (IQ), not only have we seen our portfolio companies raise subsequent rounds of funding but we are also witnessing a jump in all the business metrics and the consumer adoption is phenomenal. 2) On which technology or sector we will see a substantial growth in this year and attract major funding? In 2015 we will see more start-ups build a complete, end-to-end product or service that bypasses the existing solutions. The full stack experience for consumers would be key and smartphone\'s will become the only interface for the consumers. Some of the sectors where we see a lot of activity are on-demand-services at home whether it is food, handyman, beauty or healthcare. The trend of mobile and digital health will increase this year. We are also getting a sense that the consumer market is moving away from DIY (Do it yourself) to DIFM (Do it for me) and kind of validates the full stack business models everyone has been talking about for a while. Other interesting spaces are fashion, gaming and fintech. We will see a lot services getting delivered through chat apps. There is lot of investment activity around fintech companies in Silicon Valley and we have already seen some action in India with investments in Lending kart, Capital floats and Neogrowth. We will see a lot more of them in the next few quarters. 3) What technologies would your firm bet on? We are looking to bet on smartphone driven consumer plays and we are actively tracking opportunities in healthcare, homecare services, foodtech and fashion. We are also very interested in multilingual content plays whether be it on the messaging or content aggregation. 4) What are your suggestions/advices to start-up entrepreneur? The start-up ecosystem is slightly tilted towards entrepreneurs as of now where too much money is chasing fewer deals. In a market scenario where capital is relatively cheap it is always good to raise money but at the same time the entrepreneurs have to be careful that they align their vision with the incoming investors before taking their money. The risk of raising capital with non-aligned investor based purely on financial considerations will come back to bite when the market starts correcting. The quality of entrepreneurs is improving every passing day and that is being reflected by the confidence shown by VC\'s investing substantial amount of capital in very early stage.