🪴 15 startup/tech predictions for 2026:
Part 1 (near email length limit)
Today I wrote a short LinkedIn post on what I think happens in tech and startups during 2026.
Some of you liked it, so here’s the longer version with justifications why I think these predictions are going to happen.
1) The AI bubble finally pops and the world realises it was never actually a bubble.
We’ve all heard we’re living in an AI bubble. Startups getting funded left and right. Not only that, but startups in the AI space raise at a significantly higher valuation with the momentum on their side.
Gemini just dropped the best reasoning model yet, OpenAI keeps pushing boundaries.
Bubble by definition assumes ‘hype without substance’, but we’re seeing tangible productivity gains and revenue growth.
History shows that transformative technologies always look like bubbles until they become infrastructure.
2) Stockholm emerges as the new San Francisco as top global talent migrates to the Swedish capital.
We’re catching up. Compare these maps 5 years ago, it would be nowhere this close.
Stockholm:
San Francisco:
3) One of the major European startups is going to IPO on one of the local stock exchanges.
We’ve just had James Wise, Partner at Balderton Capital on Etn. last month talking about trend of UK IPOs.
The London Stock Exchange fixed the main problems that pushed everyone to Nasdaq - new listing rules, multi-currency stocks, and secondary markets where employees can sell shares before IPO.
With new tax breaks and pension funds buying equities again, listing in London in 2026 might actually be the better play.
4) SpaceX IPOs above $2T market cap.
As of January 2, 2026, Elon Musk’s net worth sits around $724B.
My logic: SpaceX can’t have market cap less than 3 times of the dude (just a guess tho, don’t go all in on Polymarkets and then come blaming me.)
5) Energy becomes the fastest-growing sector as data centres outpace the stability of the current power grid.
AI needs chips. Chips eat energy. Energy grids not good. Need to build better energy grids.
6) Elon Musk acquires yet another massive corporation that functioned perfectly fine without his intervention.
Coming back to the screenshot of Elon Musk’s net worth, he can do anything now. And when he gets bored, he does exactly that.
Fun fact: Elon’s net worth is almost as close to $1T than mine is to Larry Page’s.
We saw the X acquisition, which everyone criticised, and yet it’s working out okay-ish. Experts claim the market cap is back to the original ~$40B-ish, at around which it was sold to Elon (who are experts I don’t know, the company is private in the end).
If I were to guess which company he buys I’d go for a chip manufacturer/energy grid to somehow sync into Tesla/Starlink ecosystem. Or you never know, maybe he buys BYD since they are starting to sell more cars than he does.
7) A European alternative to Y Combinator launches with competitive terms specifically tailored for local founders.
We have a fair amount of European startup accelerators, yet most of them invest only after demo day.
None (currently) promise the lovely $500k at 7% of your company the moment you choose to join them.
The closest one is Antler, who invest around €100,000 for ~10% equity once you pass their internal investment committee as part of the cohort.
I think someone will (maybe even Paul Graham himself) open a EU-based residency that matches YC’s terms for founders.
8) Gemini overtakes ChatGPT for good. OpenAI cannot compete with the sheer scale of Google's consumer data.
Google's been collecting consumer behavior data across search, maps, email, calendar, docs for 25 years. It’s not only sheer volume of the data they have, it’s the context of it all.
OpenAI scrapes the web, Google is THE web.
Google built TPUs specifically for AI workloads and owns data center infrastructure globally. OpenAI rents compute from Azure.
The only reason why it was this close so far is because OpenAI had the first-mover advantage and managed to capture most of the market from the get-go.
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