Welcome 2026 - The year of digital confidence*

Dear partners and friends,

With the following review, I would like to sincerely thank all customers, partners, friends and team members who together achieved and made so much possible in 2025:

After a relaxing and sunny winter break in the mountains, I'm looking forward to 2026 with great optimism and am excited about the adventures and milestones to come. Together, with courage, ingenuity, and confidence, we will seize the opportunities that the new AI world offers, true to our motto for 2026: "Technology meets Teamplay."

  • 🇺🇸 Co-working in San Francisco - thanks to #Remotework I will once again enjoy the freedom in March and work in the Bay Area to cultivate friendships, experience the great nature while #mountainbiking and #surfing and exchange ideas with investors, founders and CTOs about the latest #AI trends.

  • 🍅 Finches AI - No tomatoes, no ketchup - Natural disasters, climate change, and geopolitics threaten global supply chains and the security of our food supply. As one of the investors of Finches AII am convinced that Catherine of Delden, Stefanie Glennand your team has the right AI and platform-based approach to intelligently connect farmers and food producers. For greater resilience and sustainability. From farm to warehouse.

  • 🤖 Enterprise AI Trends 2026 - Convergence of Agentic Software Development, Context Engineering, and AI-driven Transformation. Following the initial experimental phase for "Vibe Coding" in companies using tools like Co-Pilot, Cursor, or Claude, 2026 will see the breakthrough of AI-driven software engineering. Driven by rapid advancements in LLMs, tooling, protocols (MCP), and security on the one hand, and immense competitive and cost pressures on European companies on the other, large software and digitalization projects can only succeed if significant portions of the code or the digital product are AI-generated. Enterprise-wide "Context Engineering," for example, using knowledge graphs, will become the indispensable semantic translation layer between LLMs and the IT, data, and process landscape of companies. Only in this way can agents and coding tools meaningfully navigate through the company's individual knowledge base and perform their tasks autonomously and purposefully—without hallucinating. In this scenario, it will be possible for the first time to (partially) automate and significantly accelerate the modernization of legacy applications using AI. Or to develop new apps "AI-native" – instead of purchasing SaaS. Learn more in our "AI Trends 2026 Report" (upcoming) and at our conference in Lisbon.

  • 🇵🇹 AV Innovation Circle 2026 in Lisbon - from April 22nd to 24th, we are inviting around 30 selected CIOs, CTOs and Tech Executives from our network for the second time to the Exchange of experiences in Lisbon, Portugal – the digital and startup metropolis in Europe. How Portugal, with the right mix of tradition and digital modernity, managed to become the “Economy of the Year 2025” according to The Economist magazine, and how agentic transformation and AI product development are successfully implemented in global enterprises – you can find out at our Lisbon location at the end of April – Bem-vindo! https://www.atlantic-ventures.com/events/the-innovation-circle-2026

*Title based on the recently published book “The Art of Digital Confidence” by Wolfgang Steih (author, former IT expert) https://www.wolfgangsteih.com/

Author

Carlo Velten

Atlantic Ventures Co-Founder & Managing Partner