State of the Unicorner, 2026

Happy Monday, and welcome to 2026.

As wild as our 2025 was, we’re feeling great going into 2026.

This week, we’re bringing you our goals for the year (you can call it the “State of the Unicorner”), as well as our analysis of incoming trends.

Stick around for our predictions on emerging industries and market opportunities, and be sure to cast your vote on your top trend.

Arek and Ethan 🦄

Our top focus is, as always, our newsletter content.

Since 2020, we’ve been sharing the hottest early-stage Unicorns-to-be every week. Last year, we also began a new series of in-person firesides with top founders, including Tarek Mansour (Kalshi), Ankur Jain (Bilt Rewards), Eric Simons (Bolt.new), and Tyler Denk (beehiiv). Missed the in-person events? Check out select recordings on our YouTube channel.

This year, our content will be expanding.

For the first time in five years, we’re excited to announce the launch of a second newsletter, focused on the stories of founders that have already achieved the unicorn status we aim to identify early with our existing weekly newsletter.

That’s all we can share for now. We’ll be making a major announcement with all the details on our socials and in the newsletter later this month.

In 2024, we hosted 2 events. In 2025, we hosted 20 events.

In 2026, we’ll be focusing on three types of events:

• Dinners: highly curated gatherings for up to 20 people. These are intimate, seated meals designed to bring together like-minded individuals for thoughtfully curated conversations.

• Firesides: conversations with top founders, investors, and operators in the startup world, followed by casual mixers.

• Experiences: takeovers and afterparties. If you’re attending busy events like Tech Week or SXSW and are looking for top experiential moments, be sure to add all our Unicorner events to your agenda.

Expect to see us in SF, LA, NYC, Austin, and Miami. Want us to visit your city? Let us know in a reply to this email!

Last month, we announced the Unicorner syndicate, aimed at connecting qualifying investors with top companies in our network.

We’ve been hard at work curating the most promising deals for the Unicorner community in 2026.

If you’re an accredited investor who would like to be notified about all our upcoming private investment opportunities in startups, be sure to complete your investor profile. We can’t share details on specific deals until you do!

Shoutout to Sydecar for being our syndicate partner and a great event co-host.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first.

Whether AI hits new highs in 2026 or the bubble pops, efficiency advancements in AI are here to stay.

Software engineering, or plainly, the ability to write code, is being treated more and more as a commodity. While this hasn’t boded well for certain jobs (such as the early career software engineering pipeline that continues to stagnate), we don’t believe the opinion that AI is taking over jobs. While increased uncertainty means less stability in a traditional career path, it also spells out opportunity.

This boils down to the effectiveness of human curation. AI will be the boundless operator, especially when guided by the skilled human hand. A capable human-AI coding partnership, as compared to a novice one, is all the difference. Properly harnessing the skill of AI guidance is a leg up in hiring, just as it is what’s allowing early-stage companies to build at an accelerating pace.

On a macro level, this translates to more products, faster. When everyone can build incredible software today (platforms like Bolt.new mean building an end-to-end platform in minutes), the human component becomes even more obvious. The moral is, whether looking to build a company or join one, investing in one’s own abilities to add personality and humanity to their output will be the deciding factor.

This year will also determine what the future of AI hardware looks like. The major AI players (and many startups) will deliver AI wearables to the market. Consumer sentiment will likely determine more than just the success of these hardware products, but also the entire market.

Infrastructure is changing rapidly. AI can’t advance without it, so naturally, there is a concerted effort to reshape our infrastructural capabilities as fast as possible while the money is on the table.

This means a greater quantity of data centers, data labeling, and energy solutions. Building here is akin to “selling pickaxes to miners” during the California Gold Rush.

While AI is and will continue to be the focus of most investors, we are looking to other industries for big bets. Just as public sentiment wasn’t very bullish on AI when investing in companies like OpenAI would have presented the greatest returns, we believe similar markets exist today.

We’re excited by robotics and bioengineering. Advancements in robotics are quickly appearing, powered by AI advancements. The same is true of bioengineering. The most obvious trend is the emergence of drugs like GLP-1 agonists that can modify the human body in ways that sound straight out of science fiction novels.

There will, of course, be more, and we look forward to sharing them with you this year!