“This year, we’ll see more women-led startups getting funded,” says Sarah Chen-Spellings, co-founder and managing partner of Beyond The Billion, a consortium of venture funds working to restore balance by pledging to invest more than $1 billion into female-founded companies. “I’m bullish that we’ll see more unicorns led by great women.

“Though women-led funds make up a small part of the venture capital market, based on research released by Venture Capital Journal (VCJ), they have made significant headway in 2023. At least 86 women-led funds held partial or final closes, raising about $3.5 billion combined, amounting to $500 million more than the year before.

She notes that women-led funds made significant strides in terms of their share of total fundraising. In 2023, they accounted for approximately 3% of the $107 billion raised globally by venture funds. This substantially improved from the 1.3% share they held in 2022. “It is still paltry, but we must celebrate overall growth.” 

Chen sees the widespread application of AI across various businesses. For example, she mentioned Fusion Fund, a partner fund that invested in Huma.Ai—a business intelligence platform empowering life science professionals with robust decision-making data, insights, and analysis. This contributes to accelerating the development of critical medical treatments.

“Generative AI is one of the major trends this year that will impact everyone, allowing people to learn and do more things. We’ve seen AI do image generation and provide customer support, and now they’re used in scientific research and development for drugs and other areas. Of course, there’s some danger that it can hallucinate and give you a nonsensical answer, but this is all based on the training data available to the AI,” says Jack Lau, who leads Swanland.AI, a company that specialises in the application of cutting-edge AI technologies for business transformation. 

“The emerging trend now is the rise of chatbots that specialise in handling specific tasks. For example, a chatbot that specialises in customer service can be designed to handle customer inquiries, while another chatbot can be designed to handle accounting or legal matters. This approach can increase productivity, as chatbots can handle tasks more quickly and accurately than humans.

”Beyond just increasing productivity, AI can enhance both learning and teaching. Complex topics that were once difficult to comprehend are now accessible to students with the help of AI. This would allow lecturers to engage more with their students and focus on ensuring they better understand the subject matter.”

Read more: Why humans still have the upper hand over AI—for now

“There has been significant growth in the preventive healthcare sector, with consumers taking more responsibility for their health instead of relying solely on the traditional ‘sick care’ system. We are witnessing increased consumer interest in health-related podcasts, exploring new fitness activities, and investing more in health products,” says Joel Neoh, managing director of Hong Kong-based DNA testing company CircleDNA. Neoh founded First Move Fund in 2023, an early-stage fund for consumer-focused startups across Southeast Asia. 

“Besides that, there is a lot of uncertainty with geopolitical tensions and war and interest rates remaining high, but we see that high-quality equities are returning. We might see a slight recovery and more liquidity in the markets this year as interest rates peak and drop, but we expect a longer-term multi-year recovery.

“As a venture capitalist, I remain optimistic about investing more this year, given the abundance of high-resilient and quality companies with talented founders emerging. With First Move Fund, we plan to continue investing in more early-stage founders and startups throughout this year.”

Read more: How to become a kick-ass entrepreneur, according to four-time exited founder Joel Neoh

“Beyond the core trends like fintech, I've been quite excited in the space of AI, especially in its application in the healthcare and edutech space where they can benefit from efficiencies offered by the tech,” says Bikesh Lakhmichand, CEO of Malaysia-based startup accelerator and early-stage investor 1337 Ventures. “Where IoT and AI intersect, it’s an exciting space and we have made some investments in that category.”

Lakhmichand is enthusiastic about generative AI’s ability to democratise content creation towards a specific individual, which resonates with his vision for inclusive technology, and finds that integrating AI into healthcare holds immense promise for personalised treatment, better diagnostics and improved treatment effectiveness. “These innovations have the potential to positively impact patient care, making treatments more accessible and efficient,” he says. 

Read more: This VC’s insights on fundraising, attracting talent, and the funding winter

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