At the turn of the year, we reached out to experts across the industry to find out what they thought the biggest trends in 2026 were going to be.  

Now, three months later, we chat with a range of venture capital (VC) companies to explore the current fintech funding landscape and assess which areas are seeing the most investment activity and the key investment trends to keep an eye on over the rest of the year. 

Spotlighting AI 

As has been the case for the past few years, AI was the talk of the town in 2025, and given that AI accounted for 58% of all fintech VC investments in 2025 according to Silicon Valley Bank, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. But will AI continue to draw this much attention in 2026? 

In our 2026 predictions piece, the answer was resoundingly yes, and according to Iulia Tudor, partner at Ascension VC, this trend will likely continue, as AI is integrated into the infrastructure used to “earn, save, and move money”, she says.  

Related:ICYMI fintech funding round-up: Wealthyhood, Payr, Pluvo, and more

“We expect more funding to flow into these ‘invisible’ layers – particularly where AI and proprietary data can improve outcomes for people on tighter budgets,” Tudor continues. 

“This includes early-stage infrastructure sitting behind payroll and marketplaces: smarter routing, better risk signals, and automation that reduce payment failures, speed up settlement, and make reconciliation less painful.”  

“When those rails work properly, cash arrives when it’s needed – and that reliability matters most for workers living closer to the edge,” she adds. 

Also expressing views on the growing demand for AI, Patrick Molyneux, partner at KPMG, says: “We are seeing a move towards AI at scale, firms looking to embed AI into core business areas such as customer support, sales, and finance rather than relying on standalone tools as well as AI infrastructure and efficiency.” 

He adds that cybersecurity and AI risk management will also be areas investors keep an eye on as they look to “engage earlier with founders due to rising levels of competition, a shift from growth towards profitability, earlier scrutiny on an overall smaller number of investments, and a focus on founders who showcase technical depth, domain expertise, and a track record of delivery”.  

AI and cybersecurity 

AI has started to seep into every vertical within the fintech industry – be it payments, compliance, and even cybersecurity, as Molyneux suggests.  

According to research from Pinpoint Group, in 2025, cybersecurity firms totalled just under $14 billion in funding across 392 rounds. 

Related:Dutch paytech Silverflow bags $40m Series B funding

In its research, Pinpoint reveals that many organisations are shifting their focuses from governance, identity, and control frameworks to instead creating “control layers for modern AI-driven environments”, suggesting that “investors and founders alike see governance not as a back-office function, but as a prerequisite for scalable AI adoption”.  

Furthermore, data from Crunchbase indicates that primarily AI-focused cybersecurity firms raised $8.5 billion across 2024 and 2025, showcasing how popular the tech in the sector is. 

Exploring the potential for further VC funding growth in cybersecurity, Carey Ransom, managing director at BankTech Ventures, explains that “we’ll see capital flow to better security and fraud solutions that defend against AI threats, and payments enablement and automation as money movement speeds up and finds rails like stablecoins in more use cases”. 

Growing stablecoin popularity 

AI isn’t the only hot topic carrying over from 2025 and influencing 2026 investment trends. Another major talking point is stablecoins. Between January and June 2025 alone, FXC Intelligence found that stablecoin infrastructure firms raised $100 million across pre-seed, seed and Series A rounds. In October, Citi Ventures also announced that it would be making a strategic investment in stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK. 

Related:STS Digital secures $30m strategic investment

Commenting on the VC potential for stablecoins in 2026, Nigel Morris, co-founder and managing partner of QED Investors, says stablecoins are “drawing meaningful venture attention as momentum continues to build”.  

“The innovation unfolding across the ecosystem is particularly compelling in cross-currency exchange, where stablecoins allow individuals and businesses to hold US dollars digitally to hedge local currency volatility and preserve purchasing power,” he says.  

“The growth speaks for itself: stablecoin payment processing jumped 87% from 2024 to 2025, reaching $9 trillion in volume. The direction of travel is clear and unlikely to reverse. These programmable, cross-border dollar rails represent credible competition to the correspondent banking system, enabling fast settlement and immutable audit trails outside traditional bank intermediation.”  

Morris concludes: “In doing so, they introduce the potential to displace deposits, increase funding volatility and allow payment flows to bypass legacy infrastructure altogether. Fintechs are demonstrating that they can lead this next wave of financial innovation.” 

Investing in trade finance 

As global trade continues to make the headlines, trade finance is also emerging as a key area of focus for VC firms. According to Alex Chikunov, founding partner of Verb Ventures: “Now that broad-brush B2B credit and BNPL models have struggled through a grinding few years, tailored specialist solutions are where we’re seeing the opportunity.  

“In 2026, we expect capital to back trade-finance fintechs that pick a narrow wedge (commodity + corridor) and own the full control stack – verification, pricing, and compliance – rather than selling ‘credit for everyone’.” 

Chikunov continues: “That’s why we’re focused on trade finance in 2026. Specialised commodity invoice factoring is a prime example: converting verified shipment invoices – metals, energy, agriculture – into immediate working capital.” 

Taking the next step 

Taking a step back from which sectors are attracting the most investment, Mei Lim, managing partner at Anthemis, notes that one key growth avenue which remains largely unexplored is the “valley of death” – the gap many start-ups fall into after securing their pre-seed and seed rounds. 

According to Lim, the path from start-up to scale-up is where the opportunity lies. She says: “The UK economy really needs more capital to flow into these spaces, because there’s no point in throwing lots of capital at start-ups – we’re not short in the UK for ideas. Where we’re short on is the capital to scale these companies up.” 

“That’s why we’ve developed a venture debt strategy which provides capital to address the valley of death funding gap,” Lim adds. 

In 2025, global fintech investment rose to £85.4 billion across 4,719 deals, up from £70.3 billion across 5,533 deals in 2024, according to KPMG’s Pulse of Fintech H2 2025 report. 

As AI, stablecoins, and other areas such as cybersecurity and trade finance continue to develop, only time will tell whether these figures are matched over 2026.