As a part of our #Outlook15 series, we asked venture capital firms – Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures, Helion Venture Partners, GrowthStory, LightSpeed Venture Partners and Inventus Capital Partners about their focus areas for 2015, and the challenges that the digital ecosystem needs to address. Answers have been shortened for brevity. Which according to you were the top developments in the digital (Internet/Mobile) industry in 2014? Why? Suvir Sujan, Nexus Venture Partners - E- commerce has matured in 2014, Internet users has reached critical mass. Karthik Reddy, Blume Ventures - $50 million to $1 billion rounds by the dozen(s) - unprecedented confidence (by no investor who is living in India btw) in the seeming promise of the Internet inflection point being achieved soon. - Global trends being mirrored here in terms of investing into a path to IPO - which suggests that IPOs and large M&A's maybe round the corner. Ashish Gupta, Helion Venture Partners - The significant adoption of smart phones by large number of people. It is a game changer because it has now produced critical mass of users in India to be able to support many different businesses. K Ganesh, Portea Medical (GrowthStory) - Rapid ‘mainstreaming’ of digital. Smart marketers have realized that offline media is a one-way street, a ‘spend-and-pray’ way to try and achieve your goals. However, digital marketing opens up the box with the ability to gather data on a minute-to-minute basis, translate this into insights and knowledge enables deep understanding of customers and…
