Where Venture Capital Will Create Enduring Value in 2026

January 29, 2026

By The Artemis Fund
The Artemis Fund believes technology can create prosperity for all. With offices in New York, Texas, Massachusetts, and Nevada, Artemis leads seed rounds for companies creating resilient families, individuals, and businesses across the US.
Venture capital continues to  concentrate into fewer, larger deals, with nearly half of all dollars flowing into AI. In 2025, global venture funding surged 47 percent to $469B, while deal count fell 17 percent and mega-rounds jumped 77 percent, accounting for 65 percent of total capital. That shift has made it harder to raise outside of AI and later stages, but it has also created real opportunity at Seed.
We are leaning into the Seed stage precisely because this is one of the best moments to invest early. The bar is higher, but the signal is stronger. Capital efficiency, customer pull, and real progress matter again. Founders are raising larger Seed rounds to meet the higher bar required at later stages, but they are also expected to achieve that traction faster. That combination is forcing more discipline early.
Teams have to move quickly, prove real customer demand, and operate with tighter spend and more grounded valuations until product market fit is unmistakable. The opportunity is that if a Seed company can achieve this, they are back in control. We are seeing founders who overcome this pressure at Seed seek to raise fewer follow on dollars to scale for less dilution and better returns. This is the new unicorn.
AI will absolutely revolutionize how we build businesses and care for our families, and we do not intend to miss the innovation coming to market. But we see the biggest opportunity outside traditional AI infrastructure and developer tools. Differentiation is moving toward companies using technology to digitize fragmented systems and help businesses and families grow and compete.
As capital floods into a narrow set of AI outcomes, large parts of the economy remain constrained by outdated systems. We see opportunity in healthcare, agentic commerce, and the future of work, where technology can lower costs, expand access, and improve economic outcomes.
Here’s what we’re hunting in 2026.

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Commerce
AI creative is table stakes. The moat will be distribution, data, and workflow. Generating images, video, and copy is no longer the hard part. The next generation of winners will control where creative lives, how it moves across channels and tools, and the data loops that connect creation to performance. We see opportunity for durable advantage in superior distribution into high-intent channels, personalization driven by user-level signals, or becoming the system that wraps the full marketing and advertising lifecycle.
Agentic commerce will redefine marketing and who it is actually for. As consumers increasingly delegate shopping decisions to AI agents, traditional advertising will matter less for routine and utility purchases. Marketing will shift toward structured, machine-readable product data that agents can interpret, compare, and act on. A bifurcation will emerge between agent-led purchasing for essentials and human-led purchasing for emotional, identity-driven categories like fashion, beauty, and experiences.
Human trust will become more valuable as content becomes more synthetic. As AI floods channels with slop and synthetic “user” generated content, influence will shift away from scale and toward trust. Simultaneously, 97% of CMOs surveyed say they plan to increase their creator marketing budgets for the year ahead. We are waiting to see who creates leverage for micro-communities, close-network attribution, and repeatable word-of-mouth loops at scale. The next evolution goes beyond influencers to everyday customers, where credibility comes from lived experience rather than audience size.
Data everywhere. Data was a hot button topic for brands and retailers, especially large ones. We expect to see this continue into 2026. In order to realize the benefits of AI, comprehensive data is foundational. Good data unlocks smart applications in discovery, search, personalization, and more. Marketing and creative teams are avid tech and AI testers, and we are starting to see adoption trickle down into other parts of the businesses, like supply chain, logistics, and manufacturing.
Care
The debate about whether women’s health is investable is over. Women’s health is increasingly being underwritten as a category with clear revenue models, repeatable patterns, and credible exits. The remaining constraint is definition, as the market is still too often framed around reproductive care rather than midlife, chronic conditions, diagnostics, care delivery, and consumer health. The winners will be companies that treat women’s health as a lifecycle-spanning category rather than a single moment.
AI will move from promise to production in drug discovery and care delivery. Healthcare AI is evolving beyond static models toward agentic, closed-loop systems that plan, iterate, and improve through continuous clinical and experimental feedback. Early signals are emerging across drug discovery and public-sector initiatives exploring always-on clinical agents. Category-defining founders will pair agentic capability with defensible data, deep workflow integration, and clear paths into regulated care environments.
Healthcare is shifting from institution led care to consumer led health. As traditional systems grow more expensive and less accessible, individuals are taking a larger role in collecting data, seeking answers, and advocating for themselves. Patients increasingly expect real-time guidance in intuitive interfaces, and companies that help people synthesize personal health data into actionable insight will define the next era of consumer health.
Specialty care platforms will scale the next generation of access, diagnosis, and treatment. Verticalized care models in areas like cardiac, pulmonary, GI, and neurodevelopmental health are proving that patients want depth, not breadth. AI and new diagnostic hardware are beginning to unlock what historically could not move online, enabling more conditions to be diagnosed and treated virtually. As reimbursement and insurance alignment catch up, specialized care will reach far more people than the traditional system can support.
Future of Work
The shift to nontraditional work will make safety-net infrastructure a defining competitive advantage. As nearly half of U.S. workers move into freelance, contract, and 1099 roles, the fastest-growing segment of the workforce will remain disproportionately lower- and middle-income and largely unsupported by existing systems. Gaps in benefits, predictable pay, credit access, and financial infrastructure will define the next phase of the labor market. Platforms that rebuild income stability will determine whether this shift widens inequality or creates durable economic mobility.
Frontline and skilled-trade workers will become the primary battleground for economic mobility. Labor shortages will be most acute in frontline and skilled-trade roles, which already comprise the majority of the workforce and offer one of the clearest paths to family-sustaining wages without a four-year degree. Platforms that modernize hiring, training, and credentialing will unlock upward mobility at scale.
Small businesses will drive job creation, but only if growth tools reach overlooked founders. Women- and minority-owned businesses represent a growing share of small businesses, yet remain systematically undercapitalized. In 2026, the companies that matter most will be those that help entrepreneurs scale, not replace them. Modern tools for financing, commerce, and operations will determine whether small businesses become engines of durable local wealth or remain subsistence-level.
The aging workforce will drive demand for flexible, income-generating work later in life. As one in four U.S. workers approaches retirement age, more adults will need ways to stay employed longer, supplement income, and avoid premature wealth depletion. Technology that enables dignified, flexible, and accessible work will play a critical role in supporting household stability. The opportunity is not extending careers as they exist today, but redesigning work for longer lives.
Fintech
AI has given fraudsters the first-mover advantage, forcing financial services into a defensive arms race. The cost and sophistication required to commit fraud are collapsing faster than existing controls can respond. As fraud scales, banks and fintechs will be forced to expand both the scope and cost of prevention. The winners will push the cost of fraud back up through real-time, adaptive, infrastructure-level defense rather than point solutions.
Legacy banking rails will no longer be the default starting point for new financial products. With regulatory clarity emerging and compliant digital dollars moving into the mainstream, stablecoins will increasingly serve as the foundation for new banking and payments models. This shift does not abandon consumer protections, but starts from a different architectural base that enables instant settlement, global reach, and programmable money. Winning teams will make stablecoin-native systems feel as safe and legible as traditional banking while unlocking new use cases across payroll, B2B payments, and cross-border commerce.
Credit underwriting will move from static profiles to real-time income and behavior. Traditional credit models will continue to fail gig workers, small business owners, and workers with volatile income. Underwriting based on real-time cash flow and earnings data will responsibly expand access without increasing risk, unlocking mobility for workers and entrepreneurs long excluded from the financial system.
As capital concentrates and technology accelerates, 2026 will be a year defined by those rebuilding systems, not chasing momentum. Artemis is focused on founders implementing technology to expand access, lower costs, and create real economic mobility across future of work, care, commerce, and fintech. If you are building in these categories, or know a team we should meet, we want to hear from you. This is where the next generation of durable companies will be built.
We believe once in a generation companies will be built by unexpected founders. If that sounds like you, pitch us here!

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