Inside the ET30: Trends shaping the future of enterprise tech
2026 Trends
If 2025 was the year of agentic applications, 2026 is the year they went to work. The 2026 ET30 reflects an enterprise technology landscape in rapid transformation. Agents are proliferating, voice is emerging as a serious enterprise interface, and AI is beginning to dismantle and rebuild entire services industries. Here's what the data showed us.
The agentic developer rises
Nine companies in this year's ET30 are building the tools that make agents possible, spanning platforms for professional developers like Braintrust, Browserbase, and Parallel, to no-code builders for the broader workforce like Dust, n8n, and Retell AI. Many were founded just a few years ago.
Explosion of AI agents
Claude Code is to AI agents what ChatGPT was to AI applications: the catalyst that showed everyone what was possible. Sixteen ET30 companies are now building in this space, with examples including Decagon and Sierra in customer service, Clay and Gong in GTM, Ramp in finance, and Glean in enterprise search.
Substantial capital intensity in Late and Giga
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The median Giga company is now valued at $41 billion, nearly three times what it was a year ago, raising $2.4 billion rounds every four months. At the Late stage, median valuations have doubled to $7 billion with rounds closing every 3.6 months. Capital is concentrating fast, and the pace is accelerating.
Youth is moving up the stack
The median founding age across the 2026 ET30 holds steady at 30, matching last year. But early and mid-stage founders are skewing younger — the median founding age for early-stage companies dropped from 28 to 27, and for mid-stage companies from 32 to 28. The next generation of enterprise founders is arriving earlier.
Median founding age across the 2026 ET30
Headcount holds, for now
ET30 companies are building with smaller teams. Mid-stage headcount has dropped from 92 to 46 employees since 2023, while early-stage remains largely flat. The signal is subtle, but as AI agents take on more of the operational workload, the relationship between headcount and growth may look very different in future ET30 cohorts.
Median headcount for 2026 ET30 early stage companies
Founder networks: Concentrated and predictable
Big Tech continues to serve as a pipeline for enterprise innovation. Of the 154 founders across this year’s ET30, 35 previously worked at Google and 14 previously worked at OpenAI. 21 studied at Stanford and 15 studied at Harvard. 112 are in the San Francisco Bay or New York City areas.
ET30 founders in either the SF or NYC areas
Participants
The ET30 is conducted in partnership with a select group of venture capitalists and corporate development teams, invited based on their track record, expertise, and reputation for discernment in enterprise technology.
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