2026 Horizons
What I'm working on
I’m broadcasting my personal focus areas for 2026. This is meant to be a beacon to all likeminded builders, investors and friends. If any of these topics resonate, I’d love to connect.
As a refresher, I previously built and sold Eve Wealth, a platform for women to accumulate and manage wealth. Before that, I launched 30+ SaaS companies with McKinsey. Since then, I’ve been a hands-on advisor to an intentional set of high integrity founders whose valuations hit $1B+, Function Health and Athena. I’ve angel invested in Zama, Seed and Aalo, among others. Then there was my best creation yet, building a family and birthing our beautiful baby girl Chloe.
In 2026, I’m actively looking to support companies working on AI-enabled roll ups, enterprise AI or democratizing access (to health, real estate or wealth).
Here are my current thoughts:
Relational AI
Having spent my early career working at McKinsey in Private Equity due diligence and then joining Oaktree and Centerbridge to restructure and merge two major retailers I’ve seen that the scalable value doesn’t live in workflows - it lives in shadow orgs, decision making logic, and change management. This is where I’ve been thinking about what I call relational AI.
Relational AI lets models reason over how an organization actually works - by making its relational context graph and decision logic machine-readable.
This is why despite the Cambrian explosion of AI tools we’ve yet to see the impact of agents in enterprise.
I’m particularly interested in:
Enterprise AI with a PE mindset (Parable, Writer.ai, Extend.ai, Cohere.io) - especially companies building a system wide diagnostic of an organization, context graphs, intent encoding, or mapping relational systems in agentic ways
AI-enabled roll-ups (Thrive Holdings, ICONIQ, General Catalyst, 8VC)
Embedded Smart Enterprise case studies / success stories (EvolutionIQ’s playbook that led to a $730M acquisition)
Frontier Health
Without health, nothing else matters. Having experienced first hand adrenal fatigue and my father passing away at 62 from something that could have been preventable, I’m passionate about personalized health and where it is heading with tracking and AI. Advances in diagnostics, lab testing, imaging, wearables, microbiome, among others is trending to everyone having a digital twin for personalized health fed by longitudinal data. This shifts care from reactive to predictive to proactive. Concierge longevity models are emerging for people who treat their bodies as long-term capital.
I believe this also has structural implications. As full-time employment declines and more people move toward ‘portfolio’ careers - freelancing, micro-companies, outcome-based retainers - I think we’re heading toward a resurgence of healthshares. Healthshares are nonprofit, community-based systems where members pool funds to cover one another’s medical expenses.
I’m particularly interested in the following areas:
AI enabled diagnostics & care: Function Health, Picardo
Group Benefits: Crowdhealth, Opolis, Freelancers Union
Hormones & Thyroid: I’m interested in investing in the hormone testing space and thyroid innovations. My previous investments include fertility (KindBody and Sunfish), microbiome (Seed), and diagnostics (Function Health)
New Neighborhoods
I remain deeply interested in how communities own things together - especially as tokenization of real-world assets becomes mainstream. Fractionalized ownership models make small or cross-border communities financially viable. Supporting this trend is a world that has swung back toward physical belonging and where community has become the new economic unit. New urbanism, member houses, pop-up cities, agritourism - people are clustering around shared identity, craft and values.
While I tend to get nerd sniped by these topics (see Georgism, Autonomous Houses and Dark Matter Labs), I do think there are economically viable opportunities and exciting implications. Companies like Bilt activate neighborhoods as economies through payments and rewards on rent. Dubai’s land department launched a real-estate tokenization pilot which companies like Prypco Blocks operating under DFSA regulation are taking advantage of. These securities will likely have a tailwind following growth in the area that comes from the World Expo 2030 and World Cup 2034. And projects like Frontier Tower are tokenizing their real estate portfolio for their tower leads and community with the intention of transforming distressed areas like they did successfully in Krezberg, Berlin.
I’m particularly interested in the following areas:
Seeing more New Urbanism Deals: Kevin, Janine and I are setting out to build the most comprehensive New Urbanism Deal Flow and due diligence as many of the upcoming projects with experts including writing checks from $100K - $1M. Have a deal we should look at submit it here
Pilot crowdfunding and other capital models for a community-owned daycare in Brooklyn NY with Birdhouse
RWAs: A16z / Adam Neuman Flow Living concept initially had ambitions for tokenized community ownership that has paused. Interested in learning about venture-backed projects still in the running to do this and tracking regulation in the US / Internationally.
Crypto (Continued)
I have been in the crypto market since 2015 and have gone through 4 cycles already. While I’ve been fascinated by the psychology driving bubbles including ICOs, NFTs, FTX, Meme coins and now prediction markets - I remain philosophically optimistic about the future of money and the role of blockchains in it. As long as people keep building, there will be new cycles.
Personally, this is what I will be focusing on:
The Payment Stack (Stable Coins - Coinbase System’s Update 1:11 + Stripes’ Agentic Commerce Protocol, Circle Partner Ecosystem)
Memory (Financial Advice - Coinbase System’s Update 0:55 + Google Nested Learning on Gemini + advances in reinforcement learning)
Privacy & Security (Zama homomorphic encryption, Lunal TEEs)
Community Building
Much of the burnout and identity crisis I see now comes from constant mediation: AI speaking for us, social feeds shaping self-concept, and synthetic reality becoming indistinguishable. In response, I’m seeing a return to physical community, ritual, off-the-record spaces, religion and environments where people can recalibrate against reality. I also believe in the rise of intuition as a high performance skill. Founders, investors, operators will need to train like athletes in somatic pattern recognition, meta-awareness, self-trust under uncertainty, differentiation of intuition vs. fear vs. synthetic influence, HRV training and brain training.
I’m exploring this through retreats, research-driven frameworks around relational intelligence and communities of like minded people.
IntuitionOS
Online Community of high-performing leaders learning to maintain intuitive signal integrity while delegating to people, systems, and AI. Together we learn when to trust automation, when to override it, and how to scale without eroding self-trust. We host quarterly meet-ups where conversations are off the record and participants rate each other’s contributions for an invite to the next gathering.
Building Embodied
In person retreat in May or June 2026 (for women)
A retreat for embodied c-suite women building companies who are ready to scale without overwhelm, create wealth without depletion, and lead without abandoning softness or intuition. We build businesses that honor the nervous system, allow for cycles, and support a life with presence. If you’ve felt stuck, have challenges asking for help or receiving it, and want to give yourself permission to delegate - this is for you.
Let’s see how 2026 unfolds! If anything here resonates and you think there’s overlap, feel free to reach out. And if we’re friends or thinking about similar things, I’d genuinely love to hear what you’re excited about this year.
Best,
Alana
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