At SemperVirens, we’re partnering with founders building enterprise-grade companies across the worlds of health, wealth, and work. Below are a few themes we’re excited to fund in 2026. These are not exhaustive, so feel free to surprise us!
What we always look for:
- Large, durable markets where legacy modernization mints enduring category leaders
- Solutions reimagining mission-critical workflows in operationally complex industries
- Pain-killer wedges that are ‘bought’ not ‘sold’ with clear ROI and natural user pull
- Bold disruptors with clear vision and the grit to re-architect the status quo
1) Agents as Digital Labor
The Why: As employee costs continue to climb, employers are looking for opportunities to cut spend by redirecting portions of their labor budgets into technology.
The What: Horizontal AI agents that behave like digital team members, taking full ownership of recurring end-to-end workflows. These products deliver completed outputs across functions with built-in accountability, transparency, and human escalation.
2) AI‑Native HCM & ESM Platforms
The Why: Today’s work is scattered across tools and tickets, with employees spending time chasing access, information, and approvals instead of moving tasks forward.
The What: New age systems of record and action that actually resolve and prevent work rather than simply routing it. Great products will look for ways to consolidate budgets across HR, IT, Ops, and Finance. The right approach will also integrate deeply with the existing stack and show clear improvements in time to close and cost to serve.
3) Broker & P/C Carrier Automation
The Why: Commercial insurance still runs on email, PDFs, and rekeyed spreadsheets. Every step between submission and settlement is an opportunity for friction and leakage.
The What: A new operating core that turns submissions and claims into structured, decision‑ready flows. Winners are building architecture that improves underwriting capacity, reduces loss ratios, and moves the industry from reactive to real-time.
4) Healthcare Cost Containment
The Why: Healthcare costs continue to rise faster than wages, creating pressure across employees, employers, and even carriers.
The What: Solutions that make savings durable through clean data, new insurance models, and chronic care management. Proof shows up in sustained reductions in PEPM, steerage that holds over time, and clinical outcomes that meaningfully reduce further spend.
5) Reduction in Pharma Spend
The Why: Pharmacy costs have become one of the largest and least controllable drivers of total spend. The layers of intermediaries and opaque pricing make it nearly impossible for employers and members to see where the money actually goes.
The What: Models that break this cycle by rebuilding the economics of drug access. That could mean direct purchasing, low-cost generic and biosimilar distribution, transparent marketplaces, or benefit designs that cut out middlemen and preserve quality of care.
6) Next-Gen MSO & Center-of-Excellence Models
The Why: Cost does not always equal quality in healthcare. High-impact care varies wildly in outcomes, and independent practices often lack the scale or operational backbone to compete.
The What: Platforms that bring operations and transparency to fragmented care. MSO models should give specialty groups – from dental and behavioral health to women’s health and NP-led clinics – the shared infrastructure, data, and contracting power to thrive. COE models should guide patients to the right sites of care through steerage, bundled payments, and measurable results.
7) Technology for Skilled Trades & Essential Workers
The Why: Shortages in nursing, construction, logistics, manufacturing, and field services are now a structural constraint.
The What: Software that helps employers find, train, and retain frontline talent via AI simulation, certification management, shift and route optimization, and supervisor tooling that captures institutional know‑how. The most compelling products improve retention and demonstrate clear dollar impact on operations.
8) Workforce Orchestration & Control
The Why: Enterprises are juggling people, agents, and systems without a clear control layer to manage it all.
The What: Orchestration that plans, executes, and learns across tools and models without lock‑in. It gives leaders a control tower with real SLAs and quality operations. Success emerges as we see higher completion rates on complex jobs and faster time to value for each new automation.
9) Compliance & Fraud Prevention
The Why: Risk now lives in the flow of work, and AI introduces new failure modes that manual sampling can’t catch. After‑the‑fact reviews are too slow and leave blind spots that erode trust.
The What: An AI first security layer that turns policy into code and learns normal behavior across identity, data, and payment flows. It intervenes in real time to prevent loss and captures audit‑grade evidence as work happens.
10) AI Governance
The Why: AI has been fast-tracked into production in many organizations, but accountability has not kept pace.
The What: Systems of record for AI operations. With this, tooling policies become explicit, lineage is visible, prompts and models are versioned and evaluated, and behavior is monitored in real time. The result is fewer violations and a total cost of ownership leaders can defend.
If you're building in or near these themes, we'd love to hear from you! Apply to our Accelerator here.
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