Balderton 
- Balderton News
- 23 September, 2026
As we look ahead to the final stretch of 2026, we asked some of our investment team which opportunities they’re most excited about right now. Their answers spanned frontier AI research and cybersecurity, the future of enterprise software, and the race to secure Europe’s oceans, orbits and more.
A common thread ran through them. The companies they’re watching aren’t going head-to-head with what already exists. They’re building a layer down: the data, the infrastructure and the systems everything else will end up sitting on top of.
Enterprise AI
I believe AI-native companies will become the new system of record. LLM advancements over the past year have unlocked more complex white collar workflows, enabling startups to own customer workflows and build customer-specific datasets. The most successful companies will find creative ways to partner with existing system of record providers, while quietly disrupting them.
Claudia Rowe Managing Director, Balderton
Cyber Security
AI is changing the economics of cybercrime. Attacks that once required significant expertise and resources can now be launched at machine speed and near-zero marginal cost. Human-led security operations – already overwhelmed by telemetry volumes, false-positive queues and talent shortage – cannot keep up.
I expect SecOps to become an AI-native system that triages data where it already lives, tackling the alert overload at the source. This will allow agents to investigate and respond to most threats autonomously, in real time, and in an auditable way – while human analysts can focus on complex incidents and threat hunting. I’m excited to back the teams building that data layer and the system of action on top of it.
Elena Moneta Managing Director, Balderton
Frontier AI
$40B has gone into 40+ new AI research labs in three years, but 93.6% of the ~$1.7T of private lab value still sits inside four companies. The more interesting work is a layer down, where the risk profile has converged on drug discovery: years pre-revenue, binary technical risk, and strategic buyers who’ll pay for a capability long before there’s a product. That puts a premium on being smart about resource allocation – knowing which experiments are worth running, and what the cheapest one that could prove you wrong actually costs.
I’m looking for teams pushing an axis the frontier labs don’t measure: formal verification, continual learning, models trained on data the big labs can’t assemble, architectures built for the silicon of tomorrow. Prior Labs was one version of this. There are many more.
Sivesh Sukumar Principal, Balderton
AI Payments Infrastructure
A year ago, our thesis was that payments infrastructure was built for humans, not agents. What’s changed is that every major payments player converged on closing that exact gap within the same twelve months. Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and the frontier labs have all shipped standards for agent-initiated payments. The capability to transact 24/7 at machine speed is now real, not theoretical, even if real volume is still thin. Consumer AI is about to stress-test that infrastructure faster than expected.
Instinct, an agent that connects to WhatsApp, iMessage and email to book flights and make reservations on a user’s behalf, raised $350M in 3 weeks, before even launching publicly. Capital is betting that a consumer agent with real account access becomes the default interface which means agents handling real money and real credentials are coming well before the authorisation, banking-connection, budget-limit and security layers are ready for them. We are looking at this next wave of tooling.
Solène Brébant Prinicpal
European Resilience
I’m especially excited about two shifts in defence. Maritime is having its air-and-land moment. Surveillance and sensor fusion transformed air and land over the last decade, but the ocean, which covers more than 70% of the planet, has lagged behind significantly. I’m excited about companies bringing autonomous surveillance and protection to contested waters.
Additionally, space has become a crucial part of defense. Ukraine showed how decisive satellite comms and imagery can be, and with Germany alone committing €35B to space security through 2030, I’m excited about the companies building sovereign space infrastructure in Europe.
