The majority of Indian startups expect to have a difficult year on the fundraising front while mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are their preferred mode of exit, according to a survey conducted by venture debt firm InnoVen Capital. The India Startup Outlook Report 2018 presented insights from more than 100 startup founders and top executives across sectors and at various stages of growth. More than half of the respondents felt the fundraising environment would be more challenging in 2018 as compared to the previous year, for which around the same numbers found the fundraising experience to be favourable. Only 37% had found the climate to be favourable in 2016. Founders said they had pitched to six to ten investors on an average to close a funding round.

According to the recent reports published by a well-known consultation firm known as the Accenture, the investments in the domain of Financial Technology has risen up to 10 percent and has reached a staggering $22.6 billion in the year 2016. The epic rise in Fintech industry is attributed to the rise of industry in China which contributed a lot in bringing this boom. Many would wonder as what brought this excessive boom? The answer is, cutting edge technology which brought together the finance and technology together, along with a little addition of artificially intelligent machine learning algorithms which made the recommender systems more effective and efficient. This merger of finance and AI came proved to be the best for several startups and now that the market has seen the spark in this merger, every second start-up is working on bringing about innovations in lesser possible time.

Neither artificial intelligence nor fintech – or even the union of the two – is really anything new, despite the recent buzz regarding all of the above. With that being said, we are indeed approaching that point where the underlying technology begins to make a noticeable difference in people's lives. From there, it won't be long before we begin to wonder how we ever lived without artificially intelligent financial advisors implementing our own personal monetary policy. Well, did you know that digital camera technology has been around since the 1970s but simply wasn't good enough to get mainstream traction until decades later? Don't worry, Kodak didn't see it coming, either.