Building Scale, Trust, and Resilience in Europe’s Digital Sovereignty
Elevator Ventures' Outlook for 2026.
In 2025, attention in VC and startups was dominated by rapid advances in large language models and generative AI. For us at Elevator Ventures (EV), AI quickly became a structural productivity tool across scouting, evaluation, and portfolio work - less a speculative experiment, more an operational baseline. Venture capital remains a people-driven business, but the role of AI is now clearly structural rather than optional.
Likewise, in our portfolio companies, 2025 marked a turning point in how AI was deployed across all industries. Here is what our colleague Iva Rakocevic observed:
In 2025, the real AI inflection in financial services was not model performance, but judgment: building vertical systems on proprietary data that can stand up to audits, regulators, and real operational risk
Focus shifted away from general-purpose models toward systems designed for reliability, explainability, and compliance. Clients of our portfolio companies, in particular in the financial services industry, stopped optimizing for scale alone and instead embedded AI where it could demonstrably operate under regulatory scrutiny. Explainability, auditability, and observability became table stakes, while novelty lost relevance.
On the flipside, rising AI-enabled fraud and increasingly automated cyberattacks accelerated the adoption of AI-native security and risk infrastructure. Systems are now required to defend against other machines in real time, fundamentally changing how trust is established and enforced. Trust has shifted from an institutional assumption to a technical capability - driving demand for identity, access, and governance layers purpose-built for AI-driven environments. This evolution made us invest in trustfull, which apply real-time intelligence to digital identity and fraud detection across financial workflows. Read more about why we invested here.
Resilience has emerged as a strategic imperative. As systems grow more interconnected, the cost of failure rises sharply, making reliability, security, and compliance fundamental requirements rather than differentiators. Cybersecurity, programmable financial rails, and operational robustness are converging into integrated resilience layers, reinforced by innovations in on-chain infrastructure that provide programmability, auditability, and settlement finality. Magdalena Chałas notes:
Today’s geopolitical volatility underscores the urgency of European resilience and sovereignty, with cybersecurity and energy technologies emerging as critical sectors for securing the future.
From Products to Workflows
Over the year, we engaged with more than a thousand companies and observed a continued convergence of finance and operations. Financial services - covering credit, payments, invoicing, and compliance - are no longer delivered as isolated products. Instead, they are increasingly embedded into unified, API-first workflows that integrate finance with risk management, ESG reporting, and even energy-related processes. Our colleague Suleiman Arabiat makes clear that more successful startups integrate deeply into customer workflows rather than offering standalone solutions:
We are witnessing the end of standalone financial products and the beginning of the workflow-native era.
AI-driven systems increasingly predict, guide, and optimize decisions in real time across finance, operations, and energy management, giving rise to new product categories. This trend is a basis for our conviction to invest in exnaton, who enable energy utilities to include dynamic electricity tariffs, energy communities, and prosumer models while integrating smoothly in existing ERPs. Read more about why we invested here.
Our colleague Noémi Szabó saw plenty of AI agentic applications in sales, customer care and wealth management. She summarizes:
As AI agents act with more autonomy, building the model is no longer the hard part - knowing what the agent is doing will be. Agent observability, including logs, traces, and anomaly detection, is becoming non-negotiable for banks, healthcare, and governments.
Stablecoins and Programmable Financial Rails
Another trend we expect to continue in 2026 is the emerging role of stablecoins. In the future, we expect stablecoins to play a growing role in global B2B payments, reinforcing their position as programmable financial rails rather than speculative assets. With increasing regulatory clarity (US GENIUS Act and European MiCA implementation) we see adoption accelerating. Stablecoins could reduce settlement friction, improve cross-border liquidity, and enable automated, agent-driven paymentsembedded directly into enterprise workflows.
This trend was seen in form of some large startup transactions, for example Stripe's acquisition of Bridge Network for $1.1 billion or Ripple buying Rail for $200 million. One aspect we want to explore is the role of cloud providers who are increasingly positioning themselves as gatekeepers of AI services and programmable payments - shaping how agentic systems transact, settle, and scale. This infrastructure dynamic will be a central strategic consideration for both startups and financial institutions.
Regulatory Outlook 2026: From Fragmentation to Scale
Regulation will continue to play a defining role in Europe’s startup and innovation landscape. We expect regulation to put a stronger focus on digital and financial sovereignty in 2026. We are monitoring the European Commission’s work program and can see several regulatory undertakings that can support startups in Europe:
The proposed 28th Regime for Innovative Companies, for example introducing the EU Inc. to create a pan-European legal entity, could materially reduce legal complexity and compliance costs for high-growth firms operating across member states. In parallel, the Savings & Investment Union aims to unlock Europe’s deep pool of private capital and channel it more efficientlyinto innovation - strengthening capital markets and improving exit optionality.
Data and infrastructure regulation is also advancing. FiDA (Financial Data Access) strives for reshaping how financial data is shared and monetized, enabling new data-driven business models while raising the bar for security and consent management. Beyond finance, initiatives such as the Cloud and AI Development Act and the anticipated Quantum Act underline Europe’s ambition to secure critical digital infrastructure, with long-term implications for cybersecurity and resilience.
Looking Ahead
Looking ahead, the European venture environment is showing early signs of renewed momentum. While liquidity constraints dominated recent years, 2026 is expected to bring a gradual reopening of exit markets. Several high-profile fintechs, including Revolut, N26, Bitpanda, and Monzo, are frequently cited as potential IPO candidates as conditions improve. A new wave of fintech IPOs - alongside continued strategic acquisitions - could reinvigorate European capital markets and restore long-awaited liquidity.
We move into 2026 with great enthusiasm as we can see major drivers supporting the European VC and startup ecosystem: the combination of more capable AI systems, emerging role of stablecoins, convergence of finance and operations across industries, improving liquidity conditions, and supportive regulatory frameworks. We believe that for startups and investors alike, success in 2026 will hinge on demonstrating clear product–market fit, regulatory readiness, and deep integration into customer workflows. Differentiation will come from proprietary data, compliance-first architectures, and embedding intelligence directly into operations.
Europe accelerates its digital transformation - building a more integrated, intelligent, and sovereign ecosystem. European sovereignty, in this context, is not about isolation, but about ensuring that core capabilities - data, intelligence, payments, and infrastructure - are designed, governed, and scaled in alignment with European values, regulation, and long-term resilience. In this environment, we believe financial institutions will increasingly rely on scaleups to integrate intelligence at scale, strengthen resilience, and embed themselves more deeply into customer ecosystems - reinforcing a European innovation stack that is competitive, trusted, and sovereign by design.
At Elevator Ventures, we will continue to work hard in 2026 to elevate the growth of our portfolio companies, the banks we are working with and hopefully the European digital economy.
Further Reading & Sources
For readers interested in a deeper dive into the themes outlined above, we recommend the following reports and analyses:
- VC Market Update: Status of 2025 and the Outlook for 2026 - Mazanti Pulse: A data-driven overview of European venture activity, liquidity dynamics, and exit expectations heading into 2026.
- CEE VC Investment Climate 2026 - The Recursive: An in-depth perspective on venture capital trends across Central and Eastern Europe, highlighting investor sentiment, sector dynamics, and regional outlooks for 2026.
- VC Trends 2026 – Vestbee: An analysis of key European VC trends for 2026, highlighting capital discipline, exit readiness, and evolving investor priorities.
- Fintech’s Next Chapter: The Trends Expected to Shape 2026 - Tech.eu: An in-depth look at how embedded finance, programmable payments, stablecoins, and AI-driven workflows are reshaping the European fintech landscape.
- State of European Tech – Atomico: A comprehensive annual report on Europe’s technology ecosystem, capital markets, and the structural challenges of scaling globally from Europe.