Valhalla Private Capitals’ Grant Lawrence and Teruel Carrasco have unveiled which industries and technologies they believe will be trending upward in the not-too-distant future.

Following suit from Valhalla Private Capital chairman  Randy Stewart Thompson -  who previously claimed medical tech was “going to become big” in 2022 - Grant Lawrence, president of Valhalla Angels Kelowna and co-president of Valhalla Angels Vancouver, remarked that infrastructures focusing on mental and physical health (propelled by the coronavirus pandemic) will “gain traction” in coming months.

On the other hand Teruel A. Carrasco, president at Valhalla Private Capital, has tipped Web3 [link] as a hot topic for 2022 alongside SaaS (software as a service), which Forbes Technology Council member Ryan Neu noted “can become highly leveraged investments when done correctly”.

Read Grant and Teruel’s comments in full below:

Teruel Carrasco, president of Valhalla Private Capital

I see a number of well established categories but a few emerging ones as well. Web3 related technologies are fast emerging from a highly niche/specialized investment category to now entering the mainstream category that is attracting a number of VC and Angel investors to make big bets. 

The others include SaaS based enterprise solutions so B to B. SaaS based opportunities continue to be attractive with low barriers to investment and angel investors tend to understand.  Capital requirements are generally lower with high upside and quick liquidity events relative to other categories like pharma (deep tech).   

Alongside the metaverse, Web3 was discussed at Valhalla Private Capital’s Ask An Expert event yesterday (1 March), which was moderated by Mark Mitchell, Edmonton Chapter President at Valhalla Private Capital and featured Blockchain Founders Fund managing director Aly Madhavji, Frontier co-founder Dhawl Shah and Jeffrey Manner, general partner at Weave VC.

Grant Lawrence, president of Valhalla Angels Kelowna and co-president of Valhalla Angels Vancouver

I will talk briefly about a few areas that I see continuing to grow and gain traction. Health, both mental health and physical health where drivers are all the related COVID issues and a need to reduce costs and provide better health outcomes; this includes subscription based health, miniaturization of medical devices to cover multiple tasks with machine learning and artificial intelligence playing more important roles (a modern day tricorder and of course new molecules being created for medicine.

Another area is driving better efficiencies and safety in the traditional industries <is it safe to call these blue collar industries such as construction (residential, commercial and industrial) and I believe we will also see a push for green, carbon neutral mining and the associated supporting software and hardware tech.

Hybrid solutions will gain further traction as we attempt to get back to F2F (fact-to-face) meetings where some people opt to connect remotely over video. And the metaverse (consumer) and omniverse (enterprise, business) will move forward with starts and stops as the hardware becomes more user friendly and the software stack more integrated. In particular, the omniverse holds the great promise of testing tangible products and process (think manufacturing) before actually physically putting anything place. You get to play and test what you want to build in the digital world, creating a digital twin where physics can hold ‘true’ to matching the real world. This will save huge amounts of time and effort. 

As the world electrifies the need for creating the energy and then storing it will affect everything we do. 

Grid-level storage and consumption points (charging stations, home and office lighting, heating/cooling etc) will be growing in popularity. This is a huge undertaking and is a trillion-dollar opportunity.

Earlier this year, presidents of Valhalla Private Capital’s Edmonton and Kelowna chapters claimed they would be bracing for “substantial growth” in 2022. 

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