Themes I’m Excited About in 2025: If You’re Building in These Areas, Let’s Connect!

Consumerism: Changing Lifestyles and Shifting Demand

1. Consumers Aging Gracefully: Opportunity to build multi-channel, outcome-focused D2C brands with offline clinics for aesthetics, skin, and hair care.
2. Housing Upcycle in India: Potential to create new-age home decor, kitchenware brands, and distribution channels.
3. Rising Consumption of Korean & Japanese Culture: Growth in F&B brand opportunities driven by cultural adoption.
4. Electronics Under-penetration + Rising Incomes: Build an appliance brand targeting ACs, refrigeration, smart TVs, etc.
5. Faster, Cheaper, Better Purchase Journey for Middle India: New distribution channels combining financial services, brand partnerships, and fast delivery for an “army-canteen” experience.
6. Rise in Content Consumption + Shorter Attention Spans: Excited about the potential for Dramabox-style platforms for India.
7. Increasing Nutraceutical Consumption: Opportunity to build new-age brands; distribution channels for nutraceutical products.
8. QC for X: Building solutions for categories with product discovery challenges, high return rates, and complex supply-side issues due to lead times and MOQ constraints.

Financial Services: Innovation Meets Regulation

1. Digitisation of Land Records: Opportunity to create new-age LAP financing NBFCs in under-penetrated regions like UP.
2. Asset-backed to Cashflow-based Lending Shift: Potential for fintech infra to enhance underwriting, monitoring, and collections for SMB-focused NBFCs.
3. Asset-Management for INR 50L-10 Cr Consumers: Building tools for MFDs to scale and provide better services; Dezerv equivalent for this target persona.
4. Data-management & Security Stack for FIs: Unifying corporate data to optimize processes; transitioning from monolithic to microservices architecture.
5. Reducing Opex for Loan Journeys: Looking for solutions to optimize acquisition, onboarding, underwriting, and collections for retail loans.
6. FRM & AML for Local Challenges: Infrastructure solutions targeting India-specific financial risk management and anti-money laundering needs.
7. Multi-Asset Fixed Income Platform: With Nifty expected to return to average at 9–10% this decade, we see an opportunity for a new-age multi-asset supply-first fixed income platform to be built.
8. Any RBI Circular on Transaction Costs: Building application layers that leverage RBI initiatives to reduce transaction costs.

B2B Marketplaces: New Frontiers in Trade

1. Export Opportunities: Categories where India is developing price parity and quality advancements such as chemicals, food processing, railways, aerospace, textiles, capital goods, pharma, etc.
2. Import Substitution: Focus on categories with strong domestic demand and high imports such as electronics, auto components, metal alloys, and more.
3. Building a B2B Brand: Opportunities in sectors with a long tail of products such as high-margin construction materials and textiles.

SaaS: The Future of AI & Automation

1. Digital Twins for Knowledge Workers: AI agents to handle repetitive tasks and co-work on knowledge-based tasks in sales, marketing, customer success, and development.
2. Adoption of Multiple AI Agents by Enterprises: Opportunity to build AI orchestration layers for managing agents and deriving ROI; similarly, building an authentication and access control layer for the agents.
3. AI in Traditional Industries: Applying AI to industries with low-tech adoption like manufacturing, AEC, and robotics for improved efficiency.
4. Smarter Devices & Faster Compute: On-device LLM solutions to power smarter devices with enhanced computing capabilities.
5. Localized AI in Industries of National Interest: AI adoption in emerging sectors like clean energy, defence, and agriculture.
6. Shift from IT Services to Services-as-Software: Productized workflows for CRM, ERP, and data management solution implementations.
7. Increase in adoption of Reddit for SaaS & TikTok for Consumers for product discovery and reviews: Enabling SMBs and new-age brands to distribute effectively via cost-optimized, high-ROAS platforms.
8. Reducing Sales Efforts for High-Ticket Consumer Sales: Tool similar to 6Sense for consumer companies to identify high-intent, high-paying customers for consultative sales.

These are just some of the themes that I’m excited about as we head into 2025. There’s so much potential for growth and disruption in these areas, and I’m eager to connect with founders who are passionate about building solutions that address these trends. If you’re building something in any of these sectors, I’d love to meet and explore how we can collaborate, please feel free to reach out to me at abhisheksingh@riverwalkholdings.com.