Theory Ventures on 12 ultimate prophecies for 2026: AI, IPOs, and stablecoins

Tomasz Tunguz, Founder of Theory Ventures

Compiled by: Yuliya, PANews

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At the end of each year, Theory Ventures founder Tomasz Tunguz systematically reviews his predictions for the past year and offers new judgments for the year ahead.

In his review of 2025, Tunguz scored his ten predictions (each worth one point) with an average of 7.85 points. This year, profound structural changes occurred in fields such as artificial intelligence, capital markets, data infrastructure, and crypto finance. These changes not only validated most of his predictions but also laid clear foreshadowing for development trends in 2026. This article will review the market turbulence of 2025 and look forward to the twelve major trends coming in 2026.

2025 Top 10 Predictions Review

Prediction 1: The IPO market will experience an explosion. Score: 0.6

Overall, the IPO market in 2025 saw a significant recovery. A total of 46 software companies went public, raising $12.3 billion, markedly higher than 21 companies and $3.8 billion in 2024, but still far below the scale during the 2021 tech IPO peak.

CoreWeave and Circle successfully went public, with strong market capitalization performance and post-listing trading; meanwhile, companies like Figma and Chime traded below their previous private valuation, indicating a more rational market valuation judgment. Some high-profile companies like SpaceX, Stripe, and Databricks did not go public in 2025 but accumulated substantial potential momentum for future years.

Prediction 2: Google will continue expanding in the artificial intelligence field. Score: 1

Google has reclaimed its top position in AI, leading in nearly all major AI categories. Its Gemini 3 model achieved a fundamental leap in pretraining efficiency and multimodal integration. Gemini 3 Flash redefined industry-leading performance and latency, becoming the default engine for high-frequency intelligent workflows. In open-source, the Gemma series models consistently top their weight class, providing inference capabilities comparable to 70B models with only 27B parameters. Even in creative media, Google’s video models rank among the top three globally, with a focus on temporal consistency and role stability, making them highly suitable for enterprise applications.

Prediction 3: Voice will become an important entry point for human-AI interaction. Score: 1

OpenAI’s report shows that by October 2025, ChatGPT’s voice chat accounted for 19% of user interactions. The global number of voice assistants reached 8.4 billion, with 153 million users in the US. It is expected that 80% of enterprises will integrate AI-driven voice features into their operations by 2026. Using Whisper, WisprFlow for voice input, and conversing with agents like Gemini Live has become routine.

Prediction 4: Total US venture capital investment will remain between $210 billion and $230 billion, but fundraising by VC funds will grow by 20%. Score: 0.5

In venture capital, total US VC investment for the year was about $220 billion, consistent with predictions, mainly driven by large-scale AI funding. However, fundraising did not grow; instead, it declined by about 20% year-over-year, with total fundraising around $65 billion. Although deal activity rebounded early in the year, prolonged liquidity constraints and a sluggish exit environment kept LPs cautious.

Prediction 5: Integration is the theme of the modern data stack. Score: 1

2025 was a record year for data infrastructure mergers and acquisitions. The “modern data stack” shifted from a collection of “best-in-class” tools to a competition to build vertically integrated platforms.

This wave of integration extended downstream, demonstrating that the current core of competition lies in compute power, computing resources, and integrated software. Notably, CoreWeave’s series of acquisitions marked the rise of “full-stack hyperscale cloud providers,” with complete tech stacks from GPUs to MLOps layers.

Prediction 6: The first company with annual recurring revenue (ARR) exceeding $100 million and fewer than 30 employees will be born. Score: 1

Native AI teams have reshaped perceptions of business efficiency. Cursor achieved $100 million ARR with only 12 employees in January 2025, and Midjourney reached $500 million ARR with about 100 team members. This efficiency far surpasses traditional SaaS companies, demonstrating the capital efficiency advantage of agent software. For comparison, Slack had 650 employees when reaching $100 million ARR, Ramp had 275, and Wiz had 400.

Prediction 7: After years of decline, with government embracing cryptocurrencies and Web3, the number of Web3 engineers in the US grew by 25%. Score: 1

In 2025, Web3 job positions in the US increased by 26%, reaching 21,600. Significant regulatory shifts sparked a wave of institutional adoption and led to the emergence of new consumer applications based on decentralized tech stacks.

Prediction 8: AI competition will drive GPU demand, with data center spending by hyperscale providers exceeding $125 billion annually. Broadcom will become the hottest semiconductor stock of the year. Score: 0.75

Compute infrastructure investments far exceeded expectations. In 2025, hyperscale cloud providers’ capital expenditure reached between $315 billion and $350 billion, with Amazon around $100 billion, Microsoft about $80 billion, and Google approximately $75 billion. In semiconductors, Broadcom’s stock surged due to AI network demands, outperforming even Nvidia in the second half of the year. Despite a third-place industry ranking in overall gains behind Micron and Google, its performance was impressive.

Prediction 9: The supply of stablecoins will grow by 50% to $300 billion, with trading volume over three times that of Visa. Score: 1

Stablecoins have become a key component of global payments. By December 2025, total stablecoin supply reached $310 billion, with on-chain annual transaction volume exceeding $46 trillion, nearly three times Visa’s volume. As enterprises seek faster, cheaper cross-border settlement methods, adoption of stablecoins in B2B payments is accelerating.

Prediction 10: Observability, SIEM, and business intelligence will begin sharing the same data lake. Score: 0

This prediction did not materialize. Although usage-based pricing models have indeed driven demand for a single data lake, and data lake architectures are increasingly dominant across workloads, the idea of observability, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), and Business Intelligence (BI) sharing a common data lake did not become a reality in 2025.

Twelve Major Predictions for 2026

Based on observations from 2025, predictions for 2026 are more systematic and in-depth, with the core logic being: Artificial intelligence is evolving from an auxiliary tool into autonomous systems, shifting from cutting-edge experiments to core infrastructure. 2026 will be the year enterprises large-scale deploy AI into actual production.

First, enterprise spending on AI agents will surpass spending on human labor for the first time. Consumer-side has already seen this phenomenon, for example, Waymo’s autonomous driving costs are higher than Uber’s, yet demand continues to grow. Enterprises, considering recruitment, training, and management costs, will accept premium pricing for agents performing repetitive tasks.

Second, 2026 will be a record year for liquidity. Companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, and Databricks are expected to go public collectively, with SpaceX and OpenAI’s IPOs potentially ranking in the top ten in history. Meanwhile, facing disruptive threats from AI, traditional companies will launch a defensive M&A wave exceeding $25 billion, opting to “buy” rather than “build” AI capabilities.

Third, vector databases will once again become critical infrastructure in the AI tech stack. Multimodal and world models impose new data structure requirements; as the hub connecting foundational models and enterprise data, the revenue of vector databases will explode.

Fourth, AI agents’ ability to autonomously execute tasks will surpass a full workday. According to METR data, AI task durations double every 7 months. Following this trend, by the end of 2026, AI agents will be able to continuously complete workflows exceeding 8 hours, fundamentally changing project configuration methods.

Fifth, AI budgets will undergo systematic review for the first time. Boards and procurement committees will question AI spending, with small models and open-source solutions gaining popularity due to cost advantages. Task-specific development will enable models to achieve or surpass state-of-the-art performance at low costs, reducing developer expenses by orders of magnitude.

Sixth, Google will further widen its lead over competitors through extensive and deep AI deployment. Breakthroughs in frontier models, edge inference, video generation, open-source weights, and search integration will force companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI to shift focus to niche areas, ending the era of full-spectrum competition.

Seventh, agent observability will become the most competitive layer in the reasoning stack. As AI agents penetrate enterprise operations, traditional engineering, security, and data observability will merge into a unified discipline. Enterprises will need end-to-end monitoring of AI code execution, security threats, and data lineage. The integration of the three observability domains predicted in 2025 will find its starting point here.

Eighth, by December, 30% of international payments will be completed via stablecoins. The efficiency advantage of cross-border settlement is too significant; as regulatory clarity in major markets improves, stablecoins will move from the crypto fringe to the core of global trade finance, replacing some B2B transactions under the SWIFT system.

Ninth, AI agents’ data access patterns will overwhelm existing database architectures. Their query frequency and concurrency needs will be at least an order of magnitude higher than humans, forcing transactional and analytical databases to undergo architectural overhaul to meet ongoing automation demands.

Tenth, data center construction scale in 2026 will reach 3.5% of US GDP. To support exponential growth in AI compute, data center investments will reach historic levels, comparable to the railway expansion in history. The only potential slowdown could come from risks in the credit market, especially rising default rates in private credit, which may become bottlenecks for these highly capital-intensive projects.

Eleventh, the internet will shift toward “agent-first” design. In the future, many developer documents and websites will be primarily designed and optimized for AI agents rather than humans. As more business procurement decisions rely on AI agents for initial information gathering and comparison, websites’ “front door” will need to be open to robots, reserving a “side door” for human visitors.

Twelfth, Cloudflare will become a key hub for agent payments. The x402 protocol reactivates the long-idle HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code, enabling AI agents to pay for API access in real-time. With its position in network infrastructure, Cloudflare will naturally become the gateway for this new business model, sparking a new round of debates on openness versus centralization.