Future Signals is Z47's view on where the next category-defining companies are likely to emerge, and the spaces we’re actively tracking alongside the founders building them.

For Indian startups, 2026 promises to be an inflection year where experiments from previous years create a foundation on which the future is built.

Market-defining investing rarely arrive fully formed. They are assembled, piece by piece, by founders who are willing to do the unglamorous work: shaping behaviour, stitching infrastructure, earning trust before scale shows up in a spreadsheet.  

Over the last two decades, we’ve observed India’s technology story unfold in phases. First, we built capability, then scale. And finally, the confidence to build world-class businesses and public-market-ready companies. We are now moving into the next phase, where founders start redefining how value is created: by owning outcomes instead of features, and by building systems that work at population scale and travel globally.

These are the Future Signals that will define 2026 and beyond.