2025 was a year of tremendous momentum for Cade Ventures - and with that momentum, it was also a year of clarity.

We invested in 9 exceptional teams across health tech, consumer tech, and connected hardware & robotics, hosted founders and co-investors around real tables, launched our digital community, and reintroduced Cade with a refreshed brand that better reflects what we’ve been quietly building: an operator-led, high-conviction early-stage firm designed to engage earlier, move faster, and partner more deeply than traditional capital.

But beneath the surface, 2025 sharpened something more fundamental: our conviction about what really matters in an increasingly compressed, noisy, AI-accelerated market. The world is not short on ideas, code, or companies - but it is short on execution, trust, and durable advantage; That gap is where we will continue to focus in the year to come.

What 2025 Made Clear

AI Compressed Formation Cycles, But Raised the Bar for Differentiation

AI has radically lowered the cost and time required to start a company. Founders can prototype faster, test more ideas, and reach early users with unprecedented speed. As investors, we can evaluate more opportunities, earlier, and with greater intentionality than ever before. AI has expanded the surface area of opportunity, but not the substance of what makes companies endure.

But as with investing, founding a company remains an emotional, human endeavor, one that requires conviction through ambiguity, trust built over time, and the willingness to make hard decisions without perfect information. Those dynamics don’t compress neatly into prompts or pattern-matching models.

We saw this play out repeatedly across the portfolio, from Function Health, where trust and credibility are foundational to consumer adoption, to Poseidon Aero and Mecka AI, where technical ambition only translated into progress when paired with speed to ship and real-world go-to-market execution. 

Across verticals, one principle keeps resurfacing: When everything can be built, what wins is what can be sold, shipped, and trusted.

Lower Build Costs Increased the Need for Real Partners

As the cost of building software continues to fall, capital alone has become less valuable; Founders need partners who can help them move faster, avoid unforced errors, and navigate the messy gap between product and market.

This shift has reinforced Cade’s mission and values: investing only where we believe we can add value  beyond capital, and striving to be the highest value-per-dollar investor on the cap table. 

In practice, this continues to mean spotting exceptional talent early, sharing a common category-defining worldview, and earning the right to partner. The belief in the market, where it’s headed, and what founders increasingly need to succeed,  shapes how we invest and how we show up.

Where the Biggest Opportunities Are Emerging

Hardware & Robotics: Physical Systems as Moats Again

As software differentiation erodes, the physical world is reasserting itself.

Robotics intelligence has reached an inflection point, but deployment - not capability - is the constraint. The gap between lab breakthroughs and production reality is widening, with reliability, integration, and operational complexity emerging as the true bottlenecks to scale. In 2026, we’re paying closest attention to the infrastructure layer - data flywheels, reliability engineering, edge-efficient models, and deployment tooling - that turn impressive demos into durable, real-world systems (see: Akash Systems).

Cade has long believed that hardware’s difficulty is its defensibility. In a world of collapsing software moats, that belief has only strengthened.

Healthcare: Intelligence Layers, Automation, and Multimodal Insight

Healthcare continues to shift beyond episodic care toward continuous intelligence. The most compelling opportunities sit above legacy systems - layering diagnostics, automation, and decision support across fragmented workflows.

We’re especially excited by:

  • Multimodal, closed-loop systems that unify data streams and translate insight into action
  • Workflow-first automation that improves user experience, enables personalization, and drives better preventative outcomes
  • Convenience-led platforms competing to become the trusted front door to care, including new access and payment models on the preventative side (see: Headquarters Health, Blue AI)
  • A clear promise of agency, empowering users rather than extracting from them (see: Alnu Health)

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Trust is foundational. In regulated, high-stakes environments, durable companies win through credibility, deep integration, and minimal friction to adoption.

Consumer: Products as Identity

Consumers are demanding more transparency, more control, and deeper alignment with their values. As technical friction falls and hard tech enters the cultural mainstream, defensibility in consumer is shifting toward companies that pair capability with culture.

The strongest companies combine:

  • Thoughtful hardware or systems that serve as durable wedges for networks, data, or services (see: Freckle)
  • Health- and wellness-led design, meeting growing consumer demand for control over their bodies and environments (see: Daylight Computer, Climatic Health)
  • Distinct, values-aligned brands that translate complex technology into trust and identity
  • Operational excellence via speed to ship, supply-chain leverage, and distribution advantage

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We’re intentional about backing teams and products that compound trust over time, not models built on addiction, extraction, or short-term engagement. The best consumer companies don’t just sell products - they turn emerging technology into culture, earning long-term trust by respecting their users and giving them real agency.

Looking Ahead to 2026: Finding Signal in the Noise

As we enter 2026, we’re continuing to build Cade as an operator-led platform designed to engage early, move with conviction, and earn trust long before a check is written. As surface-level differentiation becomes easier to manufacture and market noise compounds, we’re doubling down on signal - backing exceptional founders who combine:

  • Extreme talent with proven velocity: founders who move with urgency, ship continuously, and can translate insight into near-term commercialization.
  • Unfair advantage: earned domain expertise, technical depth, or lived experience that maps directly to the problem the company must solve to become category-defining.
  • 10× solution in a high-intent market: products with clear customer pull or credible evidence they can meaningfully outperform the status quo, with downstream impact that improves how people live or how businesses operate.

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While 2025 laid the foundation, this next chapter is about building on that momentum and scaling Cade to empower founders for the long term.

If you’re building something ambitious, we’d love to meet you. Here’s to what’s next!