A $10 billion marketing company?

That is the prophecy of Bain Capital Ventures’ Ajay Agarwal, who was among venture capitalists surveyed by Inc. magazine for their 2013 predictions.

“One statistic in a recent Gartner report stuck out to Agarwal, who joined Bain in 2003 to focus on early stage mobile, internet, and software investments: By 2017, CMOs will be spending more on IT than CIOs,” Inc. said in the report. Agarwal believes this massive shift is being driven by the customer data that simply did not exist a decade ago.

"There's so much data that exists, but now marketers can now actually measure its efficacy," he told Inc.

Bain has already funded a few companies that leverage big data for marketing purposes, including BloomReach, a cloud marketing platform, and TellApart, an innovative predictive customer analytics platform, the report said.

Among the seven “Bold Predictions For 2013 From The World's Top VCs” were two by New Enterprise Associates’ Patrick Chung: funding for a 16-year-old entrepreneur; and a start-up that reaches 10 million users without accepting a dime of venture or angel money.

Chung is co-head of the venture firm’s seed-stage investing practice and the founding partner of NEA and Harvard's Experiment Fund. He is based in Menlo Park, Calif.

"Technology is not a peripheral anymore—kids are growing up natively online and so it's natural for them to create something virtual, just as it was natural for you or I to build our own skateboards or tin-can walkie talkies. The brains are wired differently by technology,” Chung was quoted as saying.

Last month, the 17-year-old founder of Summly, Nick D'Aloisio, picked up $1 million in seed financing, in part from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka Shing, the Inc. report said.

Justifying his second prediction, Chung said: "If there's one thing that we've seen at NEA, it's that the costs of starting a company are asymptotically approaching zero."

Chung calls it the "Zuckerberg effect"—the idea that a young person starting with absolutely nothing is able to create something massive simply out of his or her dorm room, the report said.

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