Startups in January raised ~US$ 1.3B across 101 deals with the consumer space having the highest number of deals (19) and the fintech space receiving the highest investment (~US$ 570M) skewed by PhonePe raising US$ 350M. This is a 50% decrease in the number of deals and ~70% decrease in the value of deals from Jan’22 which observed close to 202 deals cumulatively raising US$ 4.5B.

We analyzed the Indian and global deals for the month of January and identified 3 emerging segments which garnered investors traction:

1. Live Commerce

• Market: The rise of short-form video as a preferred content format across India today has created avenues for ‘creator and content-led commerce’. 
• On the demand side, India has an active user base of ~250M that is expected to reach ~650M by 2025. On the supply side, there’s more than 45M users who create and post at least one short-form video in a month – giving rise to a robust creator economy & an enabling ecosystem of players helping creators with content creation, community management and monetization.
• Recent investment: Peepul Tree, a live-commerce platform connecting India’s artisans to global consumers raised US$ 6M led by Elevar Equity.

• Key players: Top five Indian players – Moj, Josh, Roposo, Trell and Chingari account for 85% of the combined monthly active user (MAU) base of short videos who have now created the right opportunity to play live commerce at scale.

Read our detailed report on Live Commerce here. 

2. Oncology

• Market: The total number of new cancer cases in India are expected to reach ~1.5 million by 2025, growing at a CAGR of ~2% from 2020 to 2025. More than 50% of cancer cases are diagnosed at advanced stages in India, which if detected earlier, can increase survival rates by ~50-80%.

• In 2022, Oncology was the 4th largest funded segment in the US, 3rd highest in China raising US$ 6.9B and US$ 1.5B respectively.
• Recent investment: OncoCare, a chain of Cancer Daycare Centre raised US$ 10M from TATA Capital.
• Key players: Innovations in cancer diagnostics for early detection and screening is the trend which is on the rise globally with funded companies like Checkcap (Israel), Median (France), IBEX (Israel) and Exact Imaging (Canada) actively working on it. Indian companies like Niramai, Easycheck and Pentax medical are some emerging players in screening and diagnosis. 

Read our detailed report on the Oncology segment here.

3. Freight Forwarding 

• Market: The global freight forwarding market is highly fragmented with global top 25 freight forwarders capturing around 21% of ocean freight and 26% of the air freight market.
• Target Addressable Market of Indian freight forwarding market is expected to reach US$ 8B by FY26 owing to improved transportation infrastructure and government policy support.
• Recent investment: Freightify, a freight rate management SaaS platform raised US$ 12M led by Sequoia Capital India, TMV, Alteria Capital and participation from Nordic Eye Venture Capital and Motion Ventures.

• Key players: There are four broad business models in which freight forwarding companies operate – Traditional freight forwarder (Hindustan Logistics), Digital marketplace (Cogoport), SaaS providers (Shipsy) and digital service provider (Wiz).

Read our detailed report on the Freight Forwarding industry  here.