VCs say tiny teams, personal agents, and a shift from vibes to payback are the tech trends to watch in 2026

SOURCE:Business Insider|BY:Melia Russell,Ben Bergman,Geoff Weiss,Julia Hornstein,Alistair Barr

Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI Business Insider asked investors at 18 VC firms to share their predictions for what's next in tech. They forecasted a flurry of acquisitions and a trend toward tiny teams and young founders. Investors warned a correction is coming for AI companies as "AI spending meets ROI reality." If January is for resolutions, it's also for predictions — and in 2026, venture capital is placing its bets on tiny teams, personal agents, and a reckoning for wildly overpriced tech startups. In recent years, companies dumped money into generative artificial intelligence tools that promised to help them work smarter and faster. The spending spree fattened revenue for companies selling copilots for coding, customer service, sales, and search — and sent their valuations soaring. Now investors say the next phase is payback. Enterprises will demand measurable returns to keep spending, and the AI companies that can't prove value may find their software renewals harder, fundraising tougher, and exits further away. As Venky Ganesan, a partner at Menlo Ventures, put it: "2026 is the 'show me the money' year for AI." Business Insider asked investors at 18 venture capital firms, including Khosla Ventures, CapitalG, Sapphire Ventures, and Greycroft to share their predictions for what's next: where they're investing, what they think is overhyped, and how they expect the market to shift in the year ahead. From IPOs to ROI, these are the tech trends to watch in 2026, according to venture capitalists. Agents stop being apps and start being employees Zoey106/Getty Images Cathy Gao, partner at Sapphire Ventures: We will start treating AI agents like junior staff with job titles, budgets, and spending limits. Once an agent can issue a refund or buy inventory, it stops being a tool and becomes a worker. This flips the business model from paying for access to paying for work completed, like tickets resolved or dollars recovered. Lindsey Li, investor at Bessemer Venture Partners: In 2026, many companies will realize that the AI-written code they've produced over the last two years is often inconsistent, hard to understand, and difficult to maintain. At the same time, a new class of agents will emerge that specialize in debugging, refactoring, and cleaning up large codebases, effectively serving as automated maintainers. Tomasz Tunguz, founder and general partner of Theory Ventures: The typical white collar worker will manage 50 agents daily in 2 years. Tiny teams get stuff done Brothers91/Getty Images Brian Bustamante-Nicholson, partner at Greycroft: Within the consumer space, we've been seeing companies do more with less for last four years. Remote work liberated companies to hire 10x employees all over the world and that naturally resulted in smaller, more efficient teams. Now we're seeing AI impact areas like creative and digital marketing, enabling companies to rely less on both internal hires and agencies to produce campaigns. We expect this trend will only accelerate into 2026, and consumer companies will continue to increase their runways. Jared Heyman, managing partner at Rebel Fund: The trend towards startups becoming increasingly capital efficient is undeniable. Startups are using AI to build AI that other startups use to build more AI — and the cycle continues. As a result, small teams can build way more, way faster, than they could even a few months ago. In 2026, we'll see very small teams achieve extreme revenue growth — perhaps even over $100 million of ARR with just a few cofounders and employees. The frontier shifts from text to systems that can see, listen, and talk Iryna Melnyk/Getty Images Manthan Shah, head of US investments at WestBridge Capital: Humans communicate primarily through voice, and that creates a massive opportunity for AI systems that can speak, listen, and interact in a human way. We are still at the very beginning of this shift, but I expect to see a surge in both horizontal and deeply vertical voice-driven applications that effectively replicate human interaction and unlock entirely new business models. Once voice becomes a true platform, it will open the door for a new generation of companies that build products that behave less like software and more like another person in the room. Simon Wu, partner at Cathay Innovation: If the last two years were dominated by text-based LLMs, 2026 is when enterprises finally move to AI that can listen and see. Voice AI becomes the default for customer support, sales, and service workflows, while video AI emerges as critical infrastructure for robotics, field operations, and enterprise analytics. Expect at least one breakout company to raise a major round in 2026 and position "multimodal intelligence" — especially voice and video comprehension — as its core differentiator. Enterprises pivot from hype to payback intek1/Getty Images Venky Ganesan, partner at Menlo Ventures: 2026 is the "show me the money" year for AI. Enterprises will need to see real ROI in their spend, and companies need to see meaningful increases in productivity growth to keep the AI spend and infrastructure going. Given some of the aggressive spend in AI, you will see a major AI company go bankrupt or have severe financial issues. Medha Agarwal, general partner at Defy.vc: 2026 will be the year AI spending meets ROI reality. Enterprises will demand hard returns from AI investments, and many pilots will be delayed, scaled back, or cancelled if value doesn't materialize. Rob Biederman, managing Partner at Asymmetric Capital Partners: In 2026, the gap between AI products with tangible, well-defined ROI and those that are perceived as nice-to-have will widen and define outcomes for companies in a way that's been lost during the mania of the last few years. We feel strongly that in 2026 corporate boards and executive teams will begin focusing on payback from AI investment as costs continue to rise with less clear business impact. The "Harvey for finance" arrives A commuter exits the Wall Street subway station, Tuesday, April 8, 2025, in New York. Yuki Iwamura/Associated Press Rajeev Dham, partner at Sapphire Ventures: In 2026, accounting and finance will become among the fastest-growing categories in enterprise AI. The pressure on companies to modernize the stack creates the perfect demand environment — yet unlike legal, the market still lacks a "Harvey for finance." I believe this vacuum represents one of the largest untapped enterprise AI opportunities. Lindsey Li, investor at Bessemer Venture Partners: Excel and financial spreadsheets become the next major AI breakout vertical. After code generation and customer support, we expect finance workflows particularly in Excel to see the next wave of real AI adoption. Financial modeling and reporting are structured but still largely manual, making them well suited for AI to help build models, clean and organize data, and surface key insights. Founders spike on technical chops — and skew younger Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang at Allen and Co.'s Sun Valley conference last year. Brendan McDermid/REUTERS Sheena Jindal, founder and managing partner at Sugar Free Capital: Outsized technical depth is going to be critical for founders. The acquihire frenzy of 2025 has shown us that premium prices are paid for exceptional founders. As the tech giants remain active with acquisitions, earlier exits via acquihires and M&A will continue to be a new driver of IRR for pre-seed and seed firms who typically have years to wait before DPI. Sarah Du, investor at Uncork Capital: Founders will continue to skew younger than in the pre-AI era. Given the rapid pace of evolution in the space, even experienced founders are learning alongside first-time founders. Speed now matters more than tenure, and younger founders are on a more level playing field than before. Knowledge workers march against AI Demonstrators gather in opposition to a plan by Elon Musks's xAI to use gas turbines for a new data center during a rally outside of Fairley High School ahead of a public comment meeting on the project in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 25, 2025. Brandon Dill for The Washington Post via Getty Images Ethan Choi, partner at Khosla Ventures: We'll have the first of dramatic anti-AI protests in certain countries with white collar workers, not blue collar workers, demanding job security in the face of AI disruption. The IPO market has liftoff Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo / AFP Tamara Steffens, managing director at Thomson Reuters Ventures: The IPO window will continue to open in 2026, fueled by pressure from early investors and improved market stability. Brian Bustamante-Nicholson, partner at Greycroft: The backlog of companies looking to go public is very healthy. In our view, the administration will continue to capitulate on economic policies that have adversely impacted the US economy and created uncertainty in the capital markets. A few marquee, bellwether IPOs frequently mentioned, like SpaceX, could open the gates and create some urgency with strategics to acquire versus wait as IPOs prove a viable path to liquidity. The rise of the mega-acquihire continues Mustafa Suleyman announced Microsoft is opening an AI hub in London PATRICK T. FALLON Tomasz Tunguz, founder and general partner of Theory Ventures: We think M&A continues to accelerate especially with the demand for AI talent at a premium. This will increase the cadence of acquihires as well as multibillion-dollar acquisitions. Sarah Du, investor at Uncork Capital: Big tech and frontier labs will keep scooping up teams to secure AI talent. Some founders may intentionally build with this in mind — optimizing for technical breakthroughs and acquisition potential rather than long-term independence. A correction comes for wildly overpriced startups JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images Deedy Das, partner at Menlo Ventures: A lot of AI valuations will take a markdown, squeezing compensation for AI researchers at tier-1 startups. The best AI companies will continue to succeed but maybe not at the extent that they'd thought. Ethan Choi, partner at Khosla Ventures: We are seeing even more egregious valuations and behavior from founders and investors relative to ZIRP times and I have a hard time seeing how we can sustain these kinds of private valuations without commensurate explosive revenue materializing. Nnamdi Okike, cofounder and managing partner, 645 Ventures: Both public and private investors will regain discipline and apply a much stricter lens to their AI investments. While the correction will begin with hyperscalers and foundation model companies, it will eventually impact the entire AI stack, including application companies. This will have a ripple effect across the tech markets. The receding tide will result in reduced valuations in 2027 in both public and private markets. Personal agents will become essential in daily life FG Trade Latin/Getty Images Shawn Carolan, partner at Menlo Ventures: 2026 will see AI agents autonomously creep into your entire digital life — not just ordering lunch, but negotiating better rates on your behalf, proactively canceling services you've stopped using, and handling complex multi-step tasks like planning and booking trips. The question won't be "Can AI book a restaurant?" but, "How much of my life do I want AI to control?" Medha Agarwal, general partner at Defy.vc: Consumer AI crosses a cultural threshold in 2026. AI companionship becomes socially acceptable. People will post about their AI assistants, talk openly about their AI friends, and integrate AI relationships into everyday conversation. Mo Jomaa, partner at CapitalG: While 2025 was the year of "agent experimentation" with fragile demos, 2026 will be the year of "agents in production" — but only if the infrastructure catches up. Data labeling is the next gold rush Kiwis/Getty Images Matt Murphy, partner at Menlo Ventures: The training data market, e.g. Mercor and Handshake, explodes as large and small model developers race to create models that are the best at very specific skill sets. This dramatically accelerates innovation in a broad set of verticals with legal and healthcare as the early movers, but also at risk of overfunding. The new frontier is the next 100 verticals. The startup birth rate soars LSOphoto/Getty Images Aaron Holiday, cofounder and managing partner at 645 Ventures: Generative AI coding tools like Replit, Loveable, and Cursor are lowering the barriers to entry so dramatically that founders who previously lacked engineering resources or traditional credentials can now build and ship products at unprecedented speed. The fluidity from idea to software product will lead to a surge in startup formation and product releases at a scale the industry has never seen before. Read the original article on Business Insider

A business person with a computer as the head — Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI

Business Insider asked investors at 18 VC firms to share their predictions for what's next in tech.
They forecasted a flurry of acquisitions and a trend toward tiny teams and young founders.
Investors warned a correction is coming for AI companies as "AI spending meets ROI reality."

If January is for resolutions, it's also for predictions — and in 2026, venture capital is placing its bets on tiny teams, personal agents, and a reckoning for wildly overpriced tech startups.

In recent years, companies dumped money into generative artificial intelligence tools that promised to help them work smarter and faster. The spending spree fattened revenue for companies selling copilots for coding, customer service, sales, and search — and sent their valuations soaring.

Now investors say the next phase is payback. Enterprises will demand measurable returns to keep spending, and the AI companies that can't prove value may find their software renewals harder, fundraising tougher, and exits further away. As Venky Ganesan, a partner at Menlo Ventures, put it: "2026 is the 'show me the money' year for AI."

Business Insider asked investors at 18 venture capital firms, including Khosla Ventures, CapitalG, Sapphire Ventures, and Greycroft to share their predictions for what's next: where they're investing, what they think is overhyped, and how they expect the market to shift in the year ahead.

From IPOs to ROI, these are the tech trends to watch in 2026, according to venture capitalists.

Agents stop being apps and start being employees

Business group of Asian men and women attending seminar or conference. — Zoey106/Getty Images

Cathy Gao, partner at Sapphire Ventures: We will start treating AI agents like junior staff with job titles, budgets, and spending limits. Once an agent can issue a refund or buy inventory, it stops being a tool and becomes a worker. This flips the business model from paying for access to paying for work completed, like tickets resolved or dollars recovered.

Lindsey Li, investor at Bessemer Venture Partners: In 2026, many companies will realize that the AI-written code they've produced over the last two years is often inconsistent, hard to understand, and difficult to maintain. At the same time, a new class of agents will emerge that specialize in debugging, refactoring, and cleaning up large codebases, effectively serving as automated maintainers.

Tomasz Tunguz, founder and general partner of Theory Ventures: The typical white collar worker will manage 50 agents daily in 2 years.

Tiny teams get stuff done

High angle view of group of friends sitting at cafe table making notes on book and working on laptop. Multiracial young people busy working while sitting at coffee shop table. — Brothers91/Getty Images

Brian Bustamante-Nicholson, partner at Greycroft: Within the consumer space, we've been seeing companies do more with less for last four years. Remote work liberated companies to hire 10x employees all over the world and that naturally resulted in smaller, more efficient teams. Now we're seeing AI impact areas like creative and digital marketing, enabling companies to rely less on both internal hires and agencies to produce campaigns. We expect this trend will only accelerate into 2026, and consumer companies will continue to increase their runways.

Jared Heyman, managing partner at Rebel Fund: The trend towards startups becoming increasingly capital efficient is undeniable. Startups are using AI to build AI that other startups use to build more AI — and the cycle continues. As a result, small teams can build way more, way faster, than they could even a few months ago. In 2026, we'll see very small teams achieve extreme revenue growth — perhaps even over $100 million of ARR with just a few cofounders and employees.

The frontier shifts from text to systems that can see, listen, and talk

A young woman in a bold red jacket and sunglasses listens to music and speaks on the phone in a lively city square. People can be seen in the background. — Iryna Melnyk/Getty Images

Manthan Shah, head of US investments at WestBridge Capital: Humans communicate primarily through voice, and that creates a massive opportunity for AI systems that can speak, listen, and interact in a human way. We are still at the very beginning of this shift, but I expect to see a surge in both horizontal and deeply vertical voice-driven applications that effectively replicate human interaction and unlock entirely new business models. Once voice becomes a true platform, it will open the door for a new generation of companies that build products that behave less like software and more like another person in the room.

Simon Wu, partner at Cathay Innovation: If the last two years were dominated by text-based LLMs, 2026 is when enterprises finally move to AI that can listen and see. Voice AI becomes the default for customer support, sales, and service workflows, while video AI emerges as critical infrastructure for robotics, field operations, and enterprise analytics. Expect at least one breakout company to raise a major round in 2026 and position "multimodal intelligence" — especially voice and video comprehension — as its core differentiator.

Enterprises pivot from hype to payback

President Benjamin Franklin's view in a hundred dollar bill between bills. — intek1/Getty Images

Venky Ganesan, partner at Menlo Ventures: 2026 is the "show me the money" year for AI. Enterprises will need to see real ROI in their spend, and companies need to see meaningful increases in productivity growth to keep the AI spend and infrastructure going. Given some of the aggressive spend in AI, you will see a major AI company go bankrupt or have severe financial issues.

Medha Agarwal, general partner at Defy.vc: 2026 will be the year AI spending meets ROI reality. Enterprises will demand hard returns from AI investments, and many pilots will be delayed, scaled back, or cancelled if value doesn't materialize.

Rob Biederman, managing Partner at Asymmetric Capital Partners: In 2026, the gap between AI products with tangible, well-defined ROI and those that are perceived as nice-to-have will widen and define outcomes for companies in a way that's been lost during the mania of the last few years. We feel strongly that in 2026 corporate boards and executive teams will begin focusing on payback from AI investment as costs continue to rise with less clear business impact.

The "Harvey for finance" arrives

A commuter exits the Wall Street subway station, Tuesday, April 8, 2025, in New York.
Yuki Iwamura/Associated Press

Rajeev Dham, partner at Sapphire Ventures: In 2026, accounting and finance will become among the fastest-growing categories in enterprise AI. The pressure on companies to modernize the stack creates the perfect demand environment — yet unlike legal, the market still lacks a "Harvey for finance." I believe this vacuum represents one of the largest untapped enterprise AI opportunities.

Lindsey Li, investor at Bessemer Venture Partners: Excel and financial spreadsheets become the next major AI breakout vertical. After code generation and customer support, we expect finance workflows particularly in Excel to see the next wave of real AI adoption. Financial modeling and reporting are structured but still largely manual, making them well suited for AI to help build models, clean and organize data, and surface key insights.

Founders spike on technical chops — and skew younger

Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang at Allen and Co.'s Sun Valley conference last year.
Brendan McDermid/REUTERS

Sheena Jindal, founder and managing partner at Sugar Free Capital: Outsized technical depth is going to be critical for founders. The acquihire frenzy of 2025 has shown us that premium prices are paid for exceptional founders. As the tech giants remain active with acquisitions, earlier exits via acquihires and M&A will continue to be a new driver of IRR for pre-seed and seed firms who typically have years to wait before DPI.

Sarah Du, investor at Uncork Capital: Founders will continue to skew younger than in the pre-AI era. Given the rapid pace of evolution in the space, even experienced founders are learning alongside first-time founders. Speed now matters more than tenure, and younger founders are on a more level playing field than before.

Knowledge workers march against AI

A woman wears a cardboard box with pink wrapping and the phrase "Say No to XAI." — Demonstrators gather in opposition to a plan by Elon Musks's xAI to use gas turbines for a new data center during a rally outside of Fairley High School ahead of a public comment meeting on the project in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 25, 2025.
Brandon Dill for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Ethan Choi, partner at Khosla Ventures: We'll have the first of dramatic anti-AI protests in certain countries with white collar workers, not blue collar workers, demanding job security in the face of AI disruption.

The IPO market has liftoff

SpaceX — Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo / AFP

Tamara Steffens, managing director at Thomson Reuters Ventures: The IPO window will continue to open in 2026, fueled by pressure from early investors and improved market stability.

Brian Bustamante-Nicholson, partner at Greycroft: The backlog of companies looking to go public is very healthy. In our view, the administration will continue to capitulate on economic policies that have adversely impacted the US economy and created uncertainty in the capital markets. A few marquee, bellwether IPOs frequently mentioned, like SpaceX, could open the gates and create some urgency with strategics to acquire versus wait as IPOs prove a viable path to liquidity.

The rise of the mega-acquihire continues

Mustafa Suleyman wearing a cream shirt with blue jeans — Mustafa Suleyman announced Microsoft is opening an AI hub in London
PATRICK T. FALLON

Tomasz Tunguz, founder and general partner of Theory Ventures: We think M&A continues to accelerate especially with the demand for AI talent at a premium. This will increase the cadence of acquihires as well as multibillion-dollar acquisitions.

Sarah Du, investor at Uncork Capital: Big tech and frontier labs will keep scooping up teams to secure AI talent. Some founders may intentionally build with this in mind — optimizing for technical breakthroughs and acquisition potential rather than long-term independence.

A correction comes for wildly overpriced startups

Perplexity CEO and founder Aravind Srinivas — JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

Deedy Das, partner at Menlo Ventures: A lot of AI valuations will take a markdown, squeezing compensation for AI researchers at tier-1 startups. The best AI companies will continue to succeed but maybe not at the extent that they'd thought.

Ethan Choi, partner at Khosla Ventures: We are seeing even more egregious valuations and behavior from founders and investors relative to ZIRP times and I have a hard time seeing how we can sustain these kinds of private valuations without commensurate explosive revenue materializing.

Nnamdi Okike, cofounder and managing partner, 645 Ventures: Both public and private investors will regain discipline and apply a much stricter lens to their AI investments. While the correction will begin with hyperscalers and foundation model companies, it will eventually impact the entire AI stack, including application companies. This will have a ripple effect across the tech markets. The receding tide will result in reduced valuations in 2027 in both public and private markets.

Personal agents will become essential in daily life

Young woman talking on video call using mobile phone at coffee shop. — FG Trade Latin/Getty Images

Shawn Carolan, partner at Menlo Ventures: 2026 will see AI agents autonomously creep into your entire digital life — not just ordering lunch, but negotiating better rates on your behalf, proactively canceling services you've stopped using, and handling complex multi-step tasks like planning and booking trips. The question won't be "Can AI book a restaurant?" but, "How much of my life do I want AI to control?"

Medha Agarwal, general partner at Defy.vc: Consumer AI crosses a cultural threshold in 2026. AI companionship becomes socially acceptable. People will post about their AI assistants, talk openly about their AI friends, and integrate AI relationships into everyday conversation.

Mo Jomaa, partner at CapitalG: While 2025 was the year of "agent experimentation" with fragile demos, 2026 will be the year of "agents in production" — but only if the infrastructure catches up.

Data labeling is the next gold rush

Young female software engineer works at night in office. — Kiwis/Getty Images

Matt Murphy, partner at Menlo Ventures: The training data market, e.g. Mercor and Handshake, explodes as large and small model developers race to create models that are the best at very specific skill sets. This dramatically accelerates innovation in a broad set of verticals with legal and healthcare as the early movers, but also at risk of overfunding. The new frontier is the next 100 verticals.

The startup birth rate soars

A new born baby wrapped in a swaddle cries with eyes closed. — LSOphoto/Getty Images

Aaron Holiday, cofounder and managing partner at 645 Ventures: Generative AI coding tools like Replit, Loveable, and Cursor are lowering the barriers to entry so dramatically that founders who previously lacked engineering resources or traditional credentials can now build and ship products at unprecedented speed.

The fluidity from idea to software product will lead to a surge in startup formation and product releases at a scale the industry has never seen before.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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VCs say tiny teams, personal agents, and a shift from vibes to payback are the tech trends to watch in 2026