Our Investing Partners’ Predictions for 2026

This week, Elon Musk merged SpaceX and xAI into an entity valued at $1.25 trillion – the world’s most valuable private company – with plans to build data centers in space.

It’s the kind of move that forces you to recalibrate what “big” means. And it caps off a 2025 that was anything but quiet:

• Defense tech nearly doubled. Funding leaped from $27.2B in 2024 to $49.1B as dual-use technologies in AI, autonomy, and cybersecurity became the fastest-growing category in venture
• AI ate everything. It captured 48% of all venture funding ($226B). The top six rounds of the year? All AI companies: OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale (read how Managing Partner Paige Craig identified Scale early here), xAI, Databricks, and Aligned – raising $111B combined
• Physical AI arrived. Robotics funding jumped from 5.58% of all startup funding in 2024 to nearly 9% in 2025 ($40.7B) as humanoid robots and autonomous systems moved from lab demos to real deployment

If 2025 was wild, 2026 is already shaping up to be even more interesting. 

Here’s what our investing partners are watching:

Paige Craig (Managing Partner)

The robot economy arrives. In this next generation, robots will be more common than humans. From fighting wars to folding clothes and delivering meals. This growth will require advanced manufacturing, materials, energy, and sensors. 

There’s also a massive picks & shovels opportunity to build platforms that service these bits – comms and systems to coordinate effort between and among these groups, security, auditing, tracking, insurance, and much more. The companies building the infrastructure layer for the robot economy will define the next decade.

Leura Craig (Managing Partner)

Commerce gets more contextual. The future of commerce will not be won through keywords and impressions, but through influence, context, and trust. Generative AI, creators, and new media are reshaping how consumers discover and decide, and the companies building for this shift will define the next generation of commerce infrastructure. 

Barometer, an AI-powered brand suitability platform for advertising, is a perfect example – enabling brands to align with suitable content at the content-specific level rather than buying blind.

Jordan Kretchmer (Senior Partner)

The grid becomes the bottleneck. The real bottleneck in electrification isn’t power generation – it’s the grid itself. Demand from AI data centers, EVs, and electrified industry is ramping faster than new transmission can be built. The problem is that utilities don’t actually have great visibility into their infrastructure. Inspections are infrequent, data is patchy, and that forces conservative operating assumptions.

That’s where companies like Nomadic Drones come in. Their drones land directly on power lines, self-charge, and continuously monitor grid health, giving utilities a live view instead of quarterly snapshots. The payoff is higher utilization of existing lines, smarter maintenance, and less pressure to rush into expensive new builds. As electricity becomes a strategic input for the AI economy, tools that help the grid see and use itself better matter more than ever.

AJ Smith (Junior Partner)

Designers start eating frontend engineering. I spent a lot of 2025 investing in hardware and it’s an area I am still incredibly excited about in 2026. But when I look at the direction AI is pushing software, here’s my take: front-end engineering as we know it might not exist in five years. We’re heading toward a world where designers & product leaders directly own the frontend, with AI handling the translation from design to production code. And I don’t believe that prompt engineering alone is the future, especially as design/user experiences become a bigger part of defensibility. 

Tools like Wonder (they just launched their private alpha) are building for this future. Unlike Figma or other current AI prototyping tools, Wonder’s mission is to connect directly to your codebase, understand your design system, and generate beautiful interfaces that can ship to production the same day. AI is going to completely rewrite entire job functions and 2026 is going to mark a major shift for the frontend.

Deepika Jonnalagadda (Junior Partner)

Teleoperation takes center stage. Forget full autonomy. In 2026, humanoid robots go mainstream through teleoperation. The companies trying to solve autonomy first are burning capital on impossible timelines. The smart money is on hybrid models. Human intelligence drives robots remotely, building toward autonomy as a byproduct of real-world deployment, with unit economics that make sense from day one.

Our portfolio company Starlife is building that future right now. (And yes, they’re hiring!) They deploy low-cost humanoids-as-a-service, each piloted in real-time by a human operator, solving customers’ critical labor shortages today while generating physical data at an unprecedented scale.

Abbie Strabala (Junior Partner)

The PCP Is dead. Long live the AI triage layer. Hot take: Primary care physicians as the first point of contact will work towards being irrelevant.

The combination of continuous biometric monitoring, AI-driven symptom assessment, and specialist-matching algorithms will route patients directly to the right care endpoint. We’re watching for founders building the infrastructure layer here – not consumer apps, but the pipes that health systems will adopt to survive margin compression. The future of healthcare routing won’t look like a doctor’s office. It’ll look like logistics optimization.

Are you a pre-seed or seed stage founder rewriting an industry? We should talk. www.outlander.vc

Disclaimer: This post contains forward-looking opinions of Outlander VC team members and does not constitute investment advice or an offer to sell or solicitation to purchase any securities. References to portfolio companies should not be interpreted as recommendations or endorsements. Past performance is not indicative of future results. All investments involve risk, including possible loss of principal.