Z Venture Capital

Key Areas of Focus in USA for 2026

2025 was a year of real progress for Z Venture Capital (ZVC). We grew meaningfully across investment scale, geographic reach, and focus areas—investing in 51 companies, launching ZVC Fund II, and opening our San Francisco office. These milestones strengthened our ability to partner with founders around the world and support them over the long term.

With this foundation in place, how is ZVC thinking about the year ahead? In this column series, members of our investment team from each region share the themes and sectors they are focused on in 2026, shaped by their on-the-ground perspectives and individual conviction. In this third installment, we turn our attention to the United States.

Read the first article from the Japan team here

Read the second article from the Korea team here

In 2026, we’re doubling down on an AI-first investment thesis built on one core belief: AI is driving a consumer behavior shift as meaningful as the mobile transition—only faster. As AI boosts productivity, we expect its impact to move beyond work tools and into everyday lifestyle decisions, creating new categories, new spending habits, and new business models.

Here are four areas where we’re actively looking for founder-led conviction and early market signals:

High-Quality Data Pipelines as the Moat

As frontier models move toward more general capabilities, the key differentiator increasingly becomes data quality, governance, and repeatable pipelines—not just access to models. We see major opportunities for startups building infrastructure to acquire, govern, label, evaluate, and continuously improve high-signal datasets—along with tooling for fine-tuning, inference optimization, evaluation, and agentic training workflows. In our view, defensibility will come from proprietary data loops and the systems that keep them clean, compliant, and compounding over time.

Consumerized Healthcare

AI is accelerating discovery, personalization, and coaching—but the biggest shift may be on the demand side. We expect willingness to pay to rise as consumers prioritize longer healthspan and better quality of life. This creates room for new consumer-facing services: continuous prevention, personalized diagnostics, AI-guided adherence, and longevity programs that feel more like membership products than traditional healthcare. As wearable and home diagnostics data becomes richer and more accessible, AI can unlock new levels of personalization—if products earn trust, deliver measurable outcomes, and integrate seamlessly into daily routines.

Solo Founders & New Earning Rails

AI is lowering the cost and barriers of starting and scaling a business. We believe the next wave of growth will come from one-person companies and the broader creator economy—where individuals operate like small enterprises with AI as their team. The “full-time job forever” model is weakening, and younger generations are experimenting with more flexible income streams. We’re interested in platforms that enable new earning models: AI-native tools for creators and micro-entrepreneurs, workflow automation for independent operators, and the financial rails—payments, underwriting, compliance, and benefits—that make these models durable.

Human X AI

AI is dramatically reducing the barrier to content creation—editing, localization, VFX, and personalized storytelling are becoming accessible to anyone. Yet original IP, taste, and authentic storytelling remain human advantages. Winners will combine AI leverage with strong creative direction, brand, and distribution. We’re especially interested in startups building community-first platforms that unlock new AI-driven media formats—along with the monetization and rights infrastructure that supports creators and sustainable ecosystems.

If you’re building in these spaces—especially where AI meaningfully shifts consumer behavior and creates durable moats—ZVC would love to connect.

My investment approach is shaped by a long-term view of how intelligence and automation are transforming real-world work. I believe we are entering a phase where AI systems move beyond assistive tools and begin to take responsibility for meaningful tasks. In this transition, the most durable companies will be built not around general-purpose technology, but around deep integration with how specific industries operate.

A central focus of my investing is agentic AI designed for vertical applications. I am drawn to companies building AI agents that operate within defined workflows, regulatory environments, and decision contexts. These systems are increasingly capable of executing work, handling exceptions, and owning outcomes rather than simply supporting users. I look for teams that start with a narrow but painful problem, integrate naturally into existing systems, and deliver clear, measurable value. In my view, vertical focus and workflow ownership create the conditions for early traction to compound into long-term defensibility.

I also plan to spend significant time on robotics and physical AI, with an emphasis on the infrastructure that enables these systems rather than capital-intensive end platforms. While foundation models and humanoid robots attract attention, I believe the more compelling opportunities lie in the layers that make physical AI deployable at scale. This includes advances in perception, control, simulation, tooling, and operational infrastructure that reduce cost and complexity in real-world environments. I am particularly interested in focused technical wedges that address concrete problems across industrial automation, logistics, manufacturing, and energy, where adoption is driven by necessity rather than experimentation.

In addition, I invest selectively in deep tech sectors that support the broader AI-driven economy. As AI workloads grow, constraints around compute, energy, reliability, and data center infrastructure are becoming increasingly pronounced. I am drawn to companies working on the less visible but essential parts of the stack—whether in AI data center optimization, energy systems, or efficiency technologies—that unlock scalability and resilience for the ecosystem as a whole.

Across these areas, my focus is on companies where technical insight, market structure, and real-world constraints are well aligned. I prioritize approaches that demonstrate clear paths to adoption and durability. I am most interested in founders who understand both the limits and leverage points of their domain, and who are building systems designed to scale in relevance as industries evolve.

2026 is shaping up to be a breakout year for a new generation of consumer AI products. I’m focused on three areas where user behavior is shifting fast, technical capabilities are maturing, and market winners are still emerging: AI-powered virtual companions, personal AI agents, and infrastructure-driven gaming.

AI “friends” and digital companions are becoming a breakout category. These are chatbots and avatars that engage users in personalized conversation, role-play, and emotional support, acting as on-demand friends, mentors, or characters. Adoption is growing fast, especially among Gen Z, and the engagement metrics are already rivaling top social apps.

Monetization is still early, but freemium subscriptions and digital goods are starting to show signs of durability. More importantly, there’s no entrenched winner yet. Dozens of new AI companion apps are launching every quarter, each offering its own take on persona, utility, or emotional engagement. The demand for personalized, emotionally resonant software isn’t going away.

I’m particularly interested in teams building companions that evolve with users over time, integrate expressive visual and voice interfaces, and unlock new types of digital relationships. The long-term potential isn’t just entertainment. It’s a new category of software built on trust, identity, and emotional connection.

I’m looking closely at agentic interfaces that collapse decision-making and execution. Vertical agents focused on health, finance, or productivity are especially interesting when they integrate deeply into the user’s environment. There’s also growing interest in expressive agents that are not just functional, but personal and emotionally intelligent.

Gaming remains one of the most durable and inventive corners of consumer tech, and it’s evolving quickly. AI is starting to change how games are built, distributed, and played. Studios are leaning into tools that speed up asset creation, automate QA, and personalize player experiences. Meanwhile, user-generated content is expanding what games can be, giving players more authorship and creative control.

This shift creates real opportunities for infrastructure startups. I’m interested in cross-platform tooling, backend systems that support AI-native gameplay, and services that help studios ship faster with smaller teams. This includes publishing tools, monetization infrastructure, and AI middleware that embeds deeply into the development cycle.

Sound Games, one of ZVC’s portfolio companies, is a good example. They help studios port and optimize games across platforms, solving a major bottleneck in multi-platform development. That kind of tooling gets more valuable as live games evolve and content pipelines scale. I’m backing the platforms and tools that make those titles possible.

These three areas — emotionally intelligent companions, agentic interfaces, and AI-native gaming infrastructure — reflect where I see real opportunity in 2026. Each combines deep shifts in user behavior with new technical leverage. I’m excited to partner with the teams building what comes next.

As AI dramatically lowers the cost of producing content, my investment focus centers on a growing scarcity: authenticity. In creative work, social relationships, and community formation, I believe authenticity—of intent, authorship, and motivation—will become one of the most valuable differentiators in the AI-native era.

Rather than backing fully automated generative systems, I’m most interested in founders building AI-powered tools and platforms that preserve human intent and creative judgment. I see AI’s role not as replacing creators, but as creative infrastructure—supporting ideation, improving technical execution, and reducing friction in complex workflows, while keeping creative decisions firmly in human hands. Lowering the barrier to creation is important, but lowering the bar for meaning is not.

In 2026, I hope to invest in creator-focused AI tools that function as creative companions rather than authors. These include platforms that help creators organize ideas, iterate more efficiently, and execute with higher quality through better UX and technical support. I’m particularly drawn to companies built with strong respect for copyright, consent, and ownership—where creators clearly understand how their work is used and retain agency over the output.

Alongside this, I plan to continue spending time with early-stage founders who are building with strong personal conviction and domain insight—especially those addressing problems that tend to be overlooked or undervalued, while being mindful of how these products can grow sustainably without losing their authenticity.

Please also take a look at our article on our investment performance in 2025.