The LEAP Global 2026 Outlook
The structural shifts redefining money flows, data flows, and software economics.
At LEAP, we back companies that strategically position themselves within the Data Flows and Money Flows of their customers. We believe this approach makes companies vital to their customers’ operations by becoming integral to their cash flow (the lifeblood of their business) and data management (a competitive imperative).
As we look ahead to 2026, five themes stand out; not as isolated trends, but as reinforcing forces reshaping how value is created, captured, and priced. Across all five, a set of powerful undercurrents is already at work:
Money is increasingly programmable
Intelligence is increasingly domain-native
Software is increasingly autonomous
Pricing is increasingly outcome-aligned
Companies that control workflows, compound proprietary data advantages, embed deeply into operations, and align economics with real-world outcomes will be best positioned to win. That is where we expect the next generation of enduring companies will be built.
Follow the Data Flows. Follow the Money Flows.
Theme 1. Tokenization of Everything (ToE)
The advent of Stablecoins represented a watershed moment for the transfer of value. It represented a use case for how to combine the power of blockchain technology - a digitally native, globally transferable unit of account - without elevated price volatility. Once money itself became programmable, tokenization stopped being theoretical.
Stablecoins put the world’s reserve currency on programmable rails—and we expect that mental model to seep into every asset class. After all, if we can tokenize the world’s reserve currency, what can’t we tokenize? Today, tens of billions of dollars in real-world assets are already tokenized, dominated by government securities and funds. Some forecasts point toward this market compounding into the trillions over the coming decade.
What changes in 2026:
Tokenization moves across assets and into workflows
Settlement speed, liquidity, and interoperability matter more than novelty
Institutions stop asking if and start asking how tokenization fits into their business model
As a result, we expect to see companies focus on tokenizing a wide range of opportunities from securities to real estate to identification (for both humans and agents). The key question for 2026 is no longer what can be tokenized. It is who controls issuance, compliance, and distribution.
Theme 2. The 3D Strategy in AI (3DAI)
In 2026, the AI frontier will shift decisively from the model layer to the application layer. The next wave of value will be captured by companies with the deepest context. As the AI battleground moves up the stack, we think companies should focus on what we call the “3D Strategy in AI”: Data, Distribution and Domain expertise.
1. Data
Proprietary data is a competitive primitive in the age of AI. A high quality, proprietary data set on its own, however, is necessary but insufficient. Durable advantage will come from a robust data flywheel, how data is generated, refreshed, governed, and fed back into systems. Static datasets decay, while live, operational data compounds.
2. Distribution
The best AI products and experience will be embedded. Workflow-native distribution—via APIs, integrations, and product-led adoption— removes friction, increases engagement and introduces real switching costs. Distribution becomes a primary competitive frontier - to both capture users and create dependency.
3. Domain Depth
Deep understanding of regulatory, financial, or operational nuance will be essential differentiator for vertical AI applications. The most valuable AI companies will look less like generic tooling and more like AI-native specialists embedded inside mission-critical workflows.
In 2026, the center of gravity shifts from generalized infrastructure to vertical, workflow-native applications with compounding data moats. Companies that execute the 3D Strategy in AI create compounding moats that become increasingly difficult to dislodge.
Theme 3. Agentic Payments: New Rails for a New Economic Actor
Agentic systems represent a structural shift in commerce. As AI agents gain autonomy, they will move beyond insight and recommendation toward execution—planning, negotiating, and acting on behalf of users and businesses. Payments are where this intelligence collides with the real economy, making them a critical bottleneck.
Traditional payment rails were designed for humans initiating transactions. Agentic systems require something fundamentally different: programmable, real-time financial rails that software can natively operate. The future of payments is not faster checkout—it’s autonomous execution.
This is where stablecoins become essential infrastructure—not as a consumer payment novelty, but as a settlement layer for autonomous systems.
What agentic payments enable:
Agent-to-Agent commerce, where little to no human interaction
Autonomous procurement and settlement, embedded inside operational workflows
Dynamic pricing and liquidity allocation, executed continuously rather than episodically
Microtransactions at global scale, economically viable for the first time
Why stablecoins are the unlock:
Instant, final settlement that matches machine speed
Programmable logic for conditional, automated, and composable payments
Borderless by default, eliminating friction from correspondent banking and legacy FX
Together, agentic systems and stablecoins enable new business models where software owns a wallet, negotiates terms, and settles value in real time.
Use cases we expect to see in 2026 include:
Cross-border financial agents managing invoices, payroll, and supplier payments for SMEs
Usage-based and streaming payments for APIs, media, and infrastructure, settled per task, per call, or per minute
Agentic treasury co-pilots reallocating liquidity across stablecoin rails, yield products, and banks 24/7 within human-defined policy guardrails
Theme 4. Co-opetition Enters Web3
In 2026, incumbents will stop watching from the sidelines. Banks and large financial institutions will move decisively from skeptics to participants—launching partnerships, issuing regulated stablecoins, and extending tokenized money into their existing distribution networks.
But this is not a winner-take-all. Banks control licenses, trust, and customer relationships. Startups will move faster, embrace new use cases and innovate at the edges. As in prior cycles, as incumbents re-enter web3, co-opetition resurfaces
What changes in 2026:
Stablecoins move from edge cases to balance sheets
Regulatory clarity encourages large, incumbents to re-enter
Competitive advantage shifts to interoperability, compliance, and trust
We are focused on companies building the connective tissue - interoperability layers, compliance infrastructure, and distribution bridges that let both incumbents and new entrants operate.
Theme 5. Software Pricing Moves From Subscriptions to Outcomes
The drive toward software automation is causing a shift to outcome-based pricing as automation fundamentally changes the nature of work. Inputs, such as human labor, will become less relevant and customers will increasingly link vendor compensation directly to the tangible business value delivered.
Fixed subscriptions made sense when software was passive. When software thinks, decides, and executes, pricing models and therefore all the infrastructure that enables it (invoicing, collections, payments) must evolve.
In 2026, AI-native and agentic workflow solutions will see a sharp shift from usage to outcomes, and from vendor risk avoidance to risk sharing. Monetization, put simply, moves from subscription-based to outcome-based.
Outcome-based models will require some combination of revenue sharing, performance-linked pricing, and ROI-based fees. These outcome based models will align incentives, lower adoption friction, and turn software into a profit center rather than a cost center.
This is hard to do well, as it will require deep data access, clear attribution, contractual sophistication and new payment infrastructure. But companies that can pull it off will turn pricing into a competitive edge.
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