Where Are Investors Going To Place Their Bets In 2016?

Everyone by now knows how 2016 is going to be a year of selective funding in the startup space. Amidst valuation markdowns of big unicorns, investors are now beginning to think more in the lines of unit economics, solid business models and scalable ideas. When Entrepreneur Media asked a bunch of industry experts, here's what they revealed could be the most exciting sectors and ideas of 2016.

Innovation within existing models

Investors want startups to basically put in efforts to emerge with innovation and variation within existing models. "Major focus this year will be on innovation within these sectors and not just dressing up of the old ideas," Jaspal Sarai, COO and Co-founder of Jaarvis Group said.

According to experts, this time industry needs to repair and discard ideas that aren't gaining any traction and sit down and think of achieving important unit metrics. Food-tech startup Faasos recently rejiged their business model. Unicorns such as Flipkart and Ola Cabs also dropped business ideas that did not click with their consumers.

FinTech

With the introduction of Unified Payment Interface (UPI), the fintech space is expected to see a lot of innovation. UPI is a big boost to simplify payments processes in the ecommerce section and many fintech startups see this as an opportunity to scale up during this process.

Education

With startups like Byju and Oliveboard securing funding from prominent institutions, there is a lot of cheer within this sector. Investors are interested in a variety of startups in this space – vocational courses, local language content creation, online tutorials for competitive exams and courses for the physically challenged category. "I'm still very gung go on education," Siddharth Talwar, Partner at Lightbox Ventures said.

Bangalore-based e-learning startup, Edureka has partnered with data integration software provider, Talend last week, to enhance its curriculum for the Big Data community.

Integration of education, skill development with hiring is something that investors want companies to focus on.

Logistics & manufacturing

Industry folks are interested in the seamless development of using logistics and manufacturing as a service. Anup Vishwanathan, Venture Principal at Venture Factory, is bullish on healthcare and logistics sectors. Anup said, "There are structural inefficiencies that exist in these areas that are massive opportunities for startups (without the associated high cash burns)."

Agritech

Investors believe there is a lot of opportunity and advantage in merging technology with agriculture in India. There is a dearth need of integrating these two platforms which would also require a deal of support from government organizations.