100 Game Changing startups to build in 2025

0:00 So ladies and gentlemen, every year Antler, they put out a report on the top 100 ideas that the founders are excited to build in. You see venture capital funds, their job is to look at interesting new startups, see where the world is going and see is it a smart idea to invest money in the startup today for hope of a return 5 to 7 or 10 years down the line. Most VC funds are interested in big outcomes. They're interested in startups that are solving big problems. So every year I love going through the antler report because what they do is they go to very successful entrepreneurs and investors in India and they say look you're already so busy you're already running a company but are there any ideas other than what you're working on that you might be interested in that you would work on if you're not working on what you're doing today and in this report today they actually have

0:45 a 100 ideas that you can go after that are exciting now and of course geni was a very very recent phenomenon but all that inclusive I think this is a great report let's go through them one by one I can't go through a 100 ideas because that'll be like a 5-hour long video, but I want to take the top three ideas in each field and go through it, especially the ideas that I'm excited about or that caught my eye. You can check out all ideas at theorofnext.com. So, without much further ado, welcome to Breakdown. Now, as you all know, the Breakdown channel is a collaborative effort between us and the Zeroda Media Network. The idea was very simple. It's, "Hey, Von, you're a good creator. Are there any other ideas that you want to work on that you probably feel might not get as many views but might still be very valuable to the audience? And I was thinking about breakdown because I was

1:31 saying that look this is deep insight right this is who wants to listen to so many different startup ideas that's a very very niche segment and I said sure let's go through these really deep reports and let's find and mine good insights and let's bring it to the audience. So that was the idea and the zerodan media network was kind enough to sponsor the entire channel. So that being said, let's get to the breakdown of the top 100 ideas that Antler is excited about. Here we go. Okay. So the first idea that I'm really excited about is something by Ranjit Prattab Singh who is the CEO and co-founder of the storytelling platform Pratalipi. His idea is an OTT platform that leverages generative AI to produce animated and motion comic content. Think Crunchyroll. And if you've ever used country roll, it's a great app to watch anime but tailored for Indian narratives

2:18 and built on a significantly more costefficient model. Today animating a video takes a very very long time. You got to hand animated. You got to do every frame. But if you saw what Openi released with their new image model and everything that happened on the internet with Giblly images of everyone you know and love. I think that there is definitely space for a lot of these stories to be told. So you can just watch animated films, maybe a 1 minute shot, maybe a 60-minute film. Someone still has to put the creative thought on what is the story. Does it appeal to people? Do they relate to the story? Is it something that they can see in their lives? Can they be the hero of the story? Can you put yourself and then we put you into the story? I think there's a lot of space for this and Pratalipi being a storytelling platform. They've probably already seen a lot of traction and progress in voice stories and I certainly think an app for storytelling especially with animated content might be valuable. The next idea is by Pratik

3:04 Podar from Nexus Venture Partners. Now Pratik says that you can actually do AI plus gaming. You can make hyperpersonalized worlds for people to play in. What he means by that is an emerging AI opportunity in India lies in AIdriven hyperpersonalized gaming experiences. A startup could build an AI powered platform that tailor game content such as your difficulty level, your challenges and narratives based on player behavior, skills, and preferences. Now, there are lots of games where you need to be an expert gamer to play. If you want to play Wukong, I don't think my mom could play it. But what if there was a version of Wukong that even my mom could play because it would be simple? Because with AI, you can make the same game multiple times, but with varying levels of difficulty. Even the environment you can sort of change depending on what the person is like who's playing on the other side. You can also create immersive, adaptive NPCs, which are non-player characters that respond intelligently to players, making

3:50 interactions feel more realistic. Another way is to use AI in game development, where machine learning can help developers create realistic environments, simulate large scale multiplayer interactions, or generate assets like landscapes and textures. If you've seen apps like Meshi or Rhoden, you can already create some 3D assets, although they aren't there yet. Uh, with icons, for example, you can already create a lot of good icons and sprites with the new GPT image model. So, progress is happening. It's not perfect yet on the 3D side, but it will get better over the next few years. The next idea is by Niha Reddi, who works at Antler. She says that personalized learning is the holy grail of education, and AI is making it a reality by essentially creating a 1:1 studenttoteer ratio. AI tutoring is likely going to be a massive opportunity. A fascinating study from Nigeria already signals this potential. Students receiving six weeks

4:36 of afterschool AI tutoring from GPT4 showed learning gains equivalent to 2 years of typical education. Even more exciting is the ability to spin up multimedia and multilingual courses on any topic in seconds. Want to explore the history of AI in Hindi? Imagine generating comprehensive tailored learning materials instantly. Instructors can now leverage generative AI to design truly innovative learning experiences by creating custom AIdriven exercises like simulations, mentoring, and co-creation. Educators essentially become tech innovators. And I think that there's so much potential in anyone, right? It could be a kid, it could also be a 40-year-old who just wants to relearn something. And then there's an AI tutor in front of him or her that just runs the person through the process, handholds the person, can see the screen like Gemini has this feature where it can you can live share your screen, it'll give you feedback live. Well, the only risk here is OpenAI or

5:22 Google going to do this, right? And you're competing with them. So, I don't know how well it'll work potentially as a business idea because the mo is kind of weaker compared to the people making the models. The next idea is by Ankit Nagori of Cure Foods. It's a very cool idea. He says that India needs to have premium rides. All that means is while platforms like chauffeur are emerging, they still don't fully address the need for a seamless premium mobility offering. You might see chauffeur as premium, but it's not actually that premium. there's a clear opportunity to develop a mobility solution, one that offers high-end vehicles, maybe like, you know, like a Mercedes V-Class or something like that, like a very high-end vehicle. You know, for people who have the money, especially people who have a lot of extra income or lots of free cash flow, they don't mind spending a little bit extra income for a slightly higher quality of life. And the quality of life is capped at a chauffeur. Why not add another cap on

6:07 top of that for premium rights? And this exists all over the world. In India, it's still an emerging market because India has never historically had so much free cash flow. But I do think you know we have an opportunity now. The next idea is from Salony Seagel of Lumai Fund. I really hope I'm pronouncing that right. She says that women make up 60% of global casual gamers and in India they now represent over 40% of the gaming audience closing in on the global average. So she says that studies show that female gamers tend to monetize and retain better yet fewer than 10% of games and apps in India are designed specifically for them. You know I was on a flight and I was sitting next to this woman who was playing Candy Crush throughout. She was playing Candy Crush for the entire 2 and 1 half hour half flight and she was playing on the iPad. So I was like, "Wow, this is certainly a market." With gaming, there's so much more male penetration because historically it's been seen as a very

6:54 maleheavy thing, but I think there is a league of casual games that even women play. The data is there. So why not go after everybody? Give me a minute. While we are discussing Antler's report, here's something you should know. Antler the team behind this report is a global early stage VC backing over 1400 companies globally across AI SAS consumer tech and more from hubs like Singapore London New York and Bangalore they invest from day zero helping founders validate launch and scale and good news residency is back launched in India it's the fastest way to turn ideas into funded startups solo founders find a co-founder build validate and pitch all in 12 weeks early teams validate and scale with expert support in just 4 weeks. Antler invests up to $500,000 at

7:40 idea stage and helps you land early product market fit through their platform Antler Forward. If you are serious about building something big, this could be your shot. The next idea is by Parama Chatterjee who is the CEO of Revolute India and she says that fingerprints, faces and voices will change all biometrics. Like in the past you'd have an ID card system in your office where you'll go you know push your ID card but if you come to our office everything runs on your face all the entrances you can just kind of stare at the thing for a second and it'll open the door for you. So she says that biometrics will also transform the future of payments. We're looking at a future where making payments becomes ridiculously convenient and even more secure than they are today. Imagine the world where you no longer need to remember passwords, enter

8:25 card details, OTPs, etc. Biometric payments leverage a person's unique physical trait to authenticate transactions. So everything eventually is just going to be you going somewhere and it knows that it's you and nobody's faking you. So there have to be ways where you can't just fake your face with a deep fake but it is quickly going to authenticate you and make the payment happen. Now with UPI you're still pulling out your phone and doing all this but at some point you'll be able to do it maybe without your phone. The next idea is by Jendra Gupta who's the founder of Jupiter and he says that there can be AI powered financial coaching. I love the idea. I think it makes the concept of influencers less useful. If I come and give you some advice as a influencer, buy a house or don't rent or do this or whatever. Honestly, it's coming from my perspective or I'm not a influencer, but let's say a influencer gives their advice. It's coming from their perspective. But every financial

9:11 decision is a an emotional one and b it's something that you know your life situation better than other people. No, why would you take life situation advice from somebody else? So, I do think that a finance adviser, an AI bot that can sit with you and tell you that, hey, you know, I have all your data. I've seen your trading pattern. I know the good behaviors you're in. I know the bad behaviors you're in. I know how much you make. I know all your additional sources of income. I'm connected to all your sources. Here's how I think you should plan the next 3 years. Here's how I should plan retirement. Here's the decisions you can't buy. And you know what you'll do is you'll ask it questions. Hey, can I go buy a a car? Hey, can I go buy a house or will it cost this much? Should I take this loan? And it'll answer all those questions for you. I do think that one of these financial advisor type apps is coming this year. Again, the challenge with many of these is how do you compete with the actual models, right? How do you compete with an open AI getting smarter and smarter and smarter because it's

9:57 absorbing all the context GP is absorbing even context from Indian scenarios, right? Because all of this data is anyway available on the internet. So you have a very thin mode saying I have these this much private data. At the same time, maybe I'm mistaken, maybe private data actually is the mode here. Although we haven't seen this to significantly change how the model behaves or give you significantly different outputs. I do think that most decisions in life are common sense. If you look at all your past history and then look at the future and adjust a little bit for risk of you know you might make a decision but world might go sideways. I think you get to the right answers and AI is very good at common sense. So if the model has common sense it'll probably make better financial decisions than you or me. So I think this is a cool idea and it's going to happen at some point. So the next idea I really like is by

10:43 Bala Parti who is the director of people plus AI and the idea is about how AI is going to transform all user interfaces. What he says is that Genai has amazing speech recognition capability. It has the potential to transform the mobile app UI. Everything that used to be an app where you do hundreds of clicks can now just be a chat interface. You can just chat with the thing and say this is what I want or this is what I don't want. Everything from ride hailing to food ordering could be done through a simple chat interface. The same kind of chat interface we have on chat GPD today. And he thinks this is also possible for B2B where essentially all these small and medium enterprise tasks like inventory management or invoicing. These can be handled effortlessly through voice instructions and a few photo clicks much like how people interact with human assistants today. So it's almost like instead of interacting

11:28 with some SAS software, you are interacting with kind of like your manager, right? You're just giving the report to the manager, but the manager is an AI bot that's filling in the details behind the scenes. You are just talking to your manager either through audio or through chat. I agree with that. I think that's where the world is eventually going to go. The next idea is by Apurwa Chamaria who is the global head of venture capital and startups from Google. India's 60 million smallmedium businesses contribute 30% of GDP yet their digital adoption remains fragmented. The next big AI opportunity lies in industry specific autonomous agents. AI powered co-pilots that can manage sales, customer support, operations and compliance. Why now? Generative AI penetration in enterprise is still below 10%. Enterprise has not picked up Genai fully yet. But Indian businesses are actively seeking tangible

12:15 productivity gains. The challenge is to fine-tune AI models for Indian languages and industry specific nuances to ensure seamless adoption. Everything from you know an SMB using a CRM. Like I told you, you don't need to go and fill in lots of big forms, right? Because right now everything is like very form driven. Maybe all these tools for SMBs are are driven by forms, which is annoying. It's just going to be a chat interface. So, I do think that the next version of Zoho is going to be, you know, a bunch of chat interfaces that you just talk to. Maybe even just one chat interface that you talk to that handles everything, all the backend stuff for you. And maybe it's updating a database, maybe it's not. But these are going to be sachet sites. These are going to be on your phone. Like I remember that we were talking to a very large media company and they said, "Well, we have people selling advertisements for the newspaper and it's in, you know, we we sell them six uh in I think advertisements, 10 in advertisements. They have a count of how much space they can actually sell and they're like to sell this we actually

13:01 have to go meet the client and how do you track all that? So they built their own tool to track all this. They built a tool to track who has whose data financial information of the company they're going to meet all of it to make their sales reps more effective. This is a tool and honestly AI can do this tool better. AI can already make your reps far more productive. Allow them to update it. Allow them to just have a call and if a rep is not doing very well then the AI can coach the person and say listen listen get back up on your feet. This week has been a bad week for you. Raj from the other team is doing better. I do believe that there's just so much opportunity in revolutionizing India's SMB with geni and yeah Apurra has got the nail on the head. The next idea is by Raav Goyel who is the head of founder scouting at Antler and it's the idea of robotics. I'm a big believer in AIX robotics. If you've seen what 1x robotics is doing,

13:46 if you've seen what Figure is doing, it's getting better. And I think next year, maybe 2026, 2027, definitely will be the era of robotics where we have robots all over our house doing cool things with us. And he says that having an AI robot at home, it doesn't need to be a full robot, even it's a cooking or cleaning robot or if it's something simple that can chop vegetables for you, it just changes your quality of life so much. Even though you might look at it as oh robotics might take away lots of jobs and so many people who are in India who are maids and this and that but I actually think if you do have a robot at home a lot of your spends anyway reduce right you're fixing things you're cleaning things etc. So you'll anyway have that disposable income which you'll anyway spend in other ways and I feel like with somebody who doesn't have too much disposable income at some point as long as you have some space a little bit of land and if you really go towards the corners of even Bangalore you'll find

14:32 lots of land available at very very very cheap a robot can actually help you make your house it can already generate nice designs it'll figure out the plan it'll make it rooted in reality and it'll go construct it for you all you need to give it is the raw materials the you need to figure out the bricks this that which actually are not as expensive as you think it is for a small house. So I do believe that robotics is going to lead to a lot more of the earth being terraformed into buildings because we simply didn't have the skill to do it without hiring somebody and those people are busy. Now you have a lot more of them available. That's of course you know the long-term consequence of robotics but even in the short term you know having the ability to have somebody in your house that can help you. There's so much value in robotics and we do believe that uh robots are going to be all over the world in a few years from now. The next idea is by Gotham Margo who is

15:21 the general partner at A91 Partners. He says that we need to scale India's talent. You see that India produces 10 million college graduates annually yet we haven't fully harnessed this vast young and skilled workforce to serve the world. The next generation of IT services and BO must blend AI with human expertise. You can't just have a human and say okay I'm billing you for this human's time or services. You need to be like well there's a human plus this human is very good at you know these tools or knows these tools. So you can get much more output much quicker because they're now competing with AI. By building people plus techdriven global services businesses, we can create millions of jobs, drive economic growth and position India as the world service hub once again. And I do believe in this thesis. I do believe that we can become the world's services hub. We are the world services hub but more in IT services. But if GPT makes a lot of those just tokens, those services just

16:06 tokens and those tokens are of course going to be cheaper than human beings. We need to adapt and evolve. So there is an opportunity of what that adaptation/evolution will look like. And I do believe that someone will figure it out. The next idea which I can wholly get behind is by Dilipkumar from Rain Matter. He says that healthcare presents numerous opportunities particularly in the realm of preventive care. We need more entrepreneurs who can create solutions that reduce the country's overall disease burden. One area that feels especially underserved is health solutions tailored for kids 8 to 15 and seniors 60 plus, helping them proactively manage their well-being. There's massive need for innovative scalable approaches that make preventive health care more accessible and effective for these groups. These days when we think of healthcare, we think of supplements and we think of you know

16:52 medicines like Ompic. This is for existing people who are between you know the age of 25 and maybe 40 who are looking to get fitter. We think of Brian Johnson and don't die. But what Dillip is talking about is the edges. How do we do kids healthcare better? How do we do old people's healthcare better? It's less sexy to work on old people's healthare but there's a lot more money there because old people have made more money across their lifetime and health is the only thing they care about by that point right apart from maybe their family so it is a much bigger opportunity commercial opportunity than people realize and more than that I think you're also sort of doing a service to the nation right you're taking care of the young and the old I think it is a pretty valuable sort of space to be in Nidhi Matur from Axelor Ventures actually has another cool idea around old people she says that the demographic cohort shaped by India India's liberization and IT sector

17:39 service boom is now entering its 50s representing a high earning group poised to inherit substantial wealth. All these people have lots of money like they've just accumulated money over years and years and years and as you know you know India in its past we used to hold a lot of money and a lot of that has become worth a lot more because that's all been invested by many of these people. So she says that this silver economy right healthy aging rejuvenation longevity aesthetics and geron nutrition is a particularly promising sector. These areas are said to experience significant growth and you can find interesting ideas that old people or older people who have wealth who are in the 50s, 60s, maybe even 70s are very interested in partaking in. Lots of community solutions, lots of food solutions. It's just a underserved market. Everyone wants to build apps for teenagers and 20-year-olds which is very very competitive and teenagers just don't have money. But the minute you go to 50

18:25 and 60 year olds, you'll realize that the wealth pool has significantly increased. The propensity to pay is also much much higher. The next idea which I can get behind is by Dhuv Gupta of Orange Health Labs. Now the idea is that India wants toxin-free food. If you've seen a lot of the content by food farmer and in general right India's waking up to the idea that not all of our food has been made in a healthy fashion and he says that the growing awareness of health and the increasing awareness of pollutants in India's air are driving a strong demand for reliable toxin-free food sources. Can you make toxin-free food and then also prove it? Like what the whole truth is done, right? Where you can take some food items and then you can say, "Well, this is what the ingredients are and there's nothing beyond this." Similarly, there's space in everything, right? In every food item you eat. This is masal dosa, but it's made without any toxins. This is the exact ingredient list. I think there is

19:11 so much potential in this and it could go all the way from cloud kitchens sourcing highquality low toxin ingredients from trusted farms to premium suppliers of certified toxin-free vegetables and fruits. This demand extends to meat, dairy, and even eggs. In each of these areas, there is a market to be found and brands to be built. And I can see how this is something that's going to be a consumer demand, especially because it's not that much more expensive to get toxin-free food. Okay, last idea comes from Nikil Basui who's actually the co-founder and general partner at footwork. He works in climate and he says that if India can tackle air pollution in its major cities through entrepreneurial innovation rather than waiting for the government which the government takes a very very long time to mobilize both cash as well as actually get things done and either way what they'll do is they'll they'll

19:56 give a tender to somebody else right so anyway it's better for a private entrepreneur to go fix this and I've seen a lot of innovations right at home now there are a lot of Indian-made solutions to remove VOCC from the air but he says that technologies like direct air capture or other breakthrough solutions could significantly improve air quality leading to better public health, higher productivity, and a major boost to GDP. The company that successfully develops and commercializes such a solution stands to become an industry giant. Anyway, if you're somebody very interested in reading all the 100 ideas, I've only covered a small fraction of it. Definitely go check out the report. It's very in-depth. It's very broad, so you can see ideas in many different fields that you might be excited about. And it's one of those things where entrepreneurs and VCs are putting their thoughts about what they would be interested in investing in or working on if they weren't working on

20:41 what they're working on today. So definitely go check it out. Definitely go execute on some of these ideas. And yeah, that's it for me. Bye.