Which industry is cheapest to enter and pays best?

Energy, AI, education and medical, scored for a new company on eight things that decide whether a market is worth entering. Every score traces back to a figure from PwC, Capgemini or an equally trusted source. Drag the weights if your priorities differ.

Ranking

Weighted score out of 100. Click a row for the reasoning behind each dimension.

Weights

Default weights favour the two things you asked about: capital to enter and margin. Everything recomputes live.

Score matrix

0 is worst, 10 is best for a new entrant, so a low-capital industry scores high on "capital". Click a cell for the evidence.

0–3 hostile4–6 mixed7–10 favourable

The four industries

Each with the sub-sectors a small company can realistically enter and the one the evidence favours.

Evidence

Method

Four research agents ran in parallel, one per industry, with the same brief: find 2024 to 2026 figures on eight dimensions, with PwC and Capgemini mandatory and every other source restricted to a list of equally trusted firms (McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, IEA, IRENA, Lazard, BloombergNEF, WHO, OECD, World Bank, IMF, Gartner, HolonIQ, Rock Health, Kaufman Hall, Stanford AI Index, NYU Stern margin tables, government statistics). Agents used web search plus Perplexity's search API to locate report pages and fetched the pages to confirm each figure. Every data point carries the source, year and URL.

The eight dimensions

Scoring

Each industry gets 0 to 10 per dimension, higher meaning better for a new entrant. The scores are judgments made from the evidence listed, not a formula over the raw figures, because the figures are in different units and come from different sub-sectors. The reasoning for every cell is one click away in the matrix. The total is the weighted mean of the eight scores, scaled to 100. The sub-sector detail matters more than the industry average: a "medical" company can be a dental clinic or a device maker, and those are different businesses.

Caveats