ARK's chief futurist's tip for the next big company - and what you're getting wrong on AI
Brett Winton explains the theses on ARK's key investments and putting a value on the companies truly changing the world.
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Please note this interview was filmed on 19 August 2026.
There are arguably few people in the world better placed to assess the economic potential of AI than Brett Winton, chief futurist at ARK Invest.
Having joined ARK in 2014, and working alongside ARK cofounder and CEO Cathie Wood for 15 years, Winton has led the proprietary research of ARK's investment team and member of the ARK Venture investment committee. He is the driving force behind how it forecasts and prices the companies delivering what ARK calls "disruptive innovation".
He says we're in the midst of a epoch-defining period of innovation and growth, and that AI is both catalyst and accelerant.
"I think future historians will look back at this business cycle and say, 'I can't believe all of these things were accelerating at the same time in the way that they are'," he says.
"That's captured in our venture exposures where we provide access to opportunities across those technologies. But then AI is such a monumental force. It's actually accelerating everything."
In this wide-ranging interview, he shares insights on how ARK actually puts an investment value on forces like AI, explains the thesis and conviction behind some of ARK's key holdings - OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX and Kalshi - and reveals the one company that could join their ranks in the years ahead.
Understanding disruptive innovation
ARK's investment process is finding the companies offering "disruptive innovation" - new technological products or services that change how the world works.
But how do you put a value on something truly revolutionary? That, in a nutshell, is Winton's role.
"I don't think you can effectively invest in disruptive innovation without having an idea of how valuable these technologies could be or might be," he says.
"We do a lot of work to understand the cost declines, performance improvements in the technologies, and then dimension what's possible in terms of addressable markets for the underlying companies that build into it."
Part of that job is also disqualifying the technologies and companies that, whilst disruptive and innovative, aren't offering that clear path to real-world value. One of those has been quantum computing, he says.
"We've looked at quantum computing multiple times and every time it's been a decade or two decades out, and we still think it's a decade or two decades out."
A more interesting example is robotaxis, which have taken the long route to viability, but show that the economics of disruptive technologies are also evolving.
"I did my first unit economics model for a robotaxi in 2011," says Winton. "And here we are in 2026 and these things are finally commercialising. In some ways it's very validating to see what we've talked about for a long time actually hit commercial reality."
"The time horizon on which these technologies are beginning to become cashflow generative is shortening."
And that is something people are potentially misunderstanding about AI right now, says Winton.
"People are walking around saying AI is obviously a bubble," he says.
"And I think they're saying that because they can't believe some of the numbers that are being thrown out where I'm saying Anthropic could have a projected US$300 billion in annualised recurring revenue by year end 2027.
"That seems so monumentally large that they just disbelieve it and are very reactive to it."
Putting a real value on AI
The discourse around AI has never strayed too far from its purported costs and transformative impacts, but less attention is given to its potential value in actual dollar terms. Answering that question accurately is the key to understanding the staggering opportunity AI represents, says Winton.
"How do we underwrite OpenAI or Anthropic?" he says.
"You have to have an expectation for how valuable foundation model companies are going to be collectively by 2030-2031 to do so. As it happens, we think there's a US$20 trillion enterprise value opportunity for the foundation model companies in that timeframe."
And that real-world value is already being realised, even if the broader world has yet to recognise it.
"Ironically, I think the world still doesn't totally internalise how meaningfully transformative AI is," says Winton. "Everybody knows that the name Anthropic and the name OpenAI."
"Maybe they don't appreciate that collectively between Grok, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini, these companies have just crossed Microsoft Office and Windows in terms of revenue, as of June of this year. And they haven't creeped past, they've screamed past."
Microsoft has spent years as one of the most-established incumbent enterprise software company on the planet, says Winton. Now in the space of a few years, AI companies are winning over much of that market.
"That franchise was built over four decades of providing the premier knowledge work platform to knowledge workers. And these companies are leading towards, we think, US$2 trillion in revenue by 2030 by displacing that giant."
Unpacking ARK's key holdings
The ARK Venture fund invests across public and private markets in five key technological sectors - AI, robotics, energy storage, multiomics and blockchain technology.
Given the nature of the companies it invests in, the fund is benchmark agnostic, but targets a minimum 20% expected rate of return annualised when underwriting positions.
While that means it has said no to many promising companies on valuation grounds.
"Ultimately what we're looking to deliver to clients is great innovation exposure and great returns on their invested capital," he says.
"If innovation is going to disrupt the world and it's maybe going to disrupt your life, you better have a lot of exposure to something that's going to appreciate a lot in value as it disrupts things."
Two of its key holdings are AI leaders OpenAI and Anthropic, which Winton believes are set to fundamentally disrupt the knowledge worker economy.
"One way to think about it is that there's US$30 trillion paid to knowledge workers annually. And if you look over time, when you offer a software product to a business, if you double the productivity of an employee, they'll pay 10% that employee's salary for the software that does that."
He says AI has already demonstrated an ability to improve the productivity of software developers tenfold, and this could proliferate to other workers as AI services improve.
"That flows down into a US$2 trillion revenue opportunity for these foundation model providers because they're providing this amazing productivity uplift for all these enterprise knowledge workers."
At 10 times revenue, that US$2 trillion opportunity represents a US$20 trillion enterprise value opportunity up for grabs.
"If you can get Anthropic for US$2 trillion - and it's the leading revenue growth and revenue capture company going after this US$20 trillion opportunity - that's pretty good money in."
While ARK is backing OpenAI and Anthropic, Winton believes there's opportunity for multiple companies to succeed in the space.
"I think it'll be a fierce fight," he says. "There's probably not going to be one winner. I think it'll be more like the infrastructure-as-a-service market where there are multiple winners and it'll displace a lot of incumbent providers and software along the way."
Another notable holding is SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), which is currently the fund's largest position. Like the AI companies, Winton says it's the economics across SpaceX's many businesses, and how they interact, that underpin the opportunity for investors.
"They are going from around $700 per kilogram to loft objects to orbit with a reusable Starship rocket less than $100 per kilogram," he says. "That gives them the option to launch a lot more communication satellites in orbit. So 10 Starship launches can basically double their bandwidth capacity in orbit, driving their satellite communications business."
"That low cost to launch also gives them the permission to launch basically GPUs into space to run AI models. Below $300 per kilogram of launch, we think that GPUs in space are economically competitive with GPUs on the ground."
"Ultimately they're going to launch tens of gigawatts into orbit to support AI. As they catch up in terms of the amount of compute they have access to, we think that their Grok model is likely to catch up to the frontier with OpenAI and Anthropic."
Regulated prediction market Kalshi is another notable holding, and one Winton says has clear transformational utility beyond its popular real-world wager markets.
"If you look at the current derivatives that we have in equities, they're actually extraordinarily crude," he says.
"Part of our position in Tesla is contingent upon an expectation for the robotaxi unit to scale commercially in a way that others aren't anticipating. But our only mechanism by which we can express that view is basically to long the equity or long the option stack on the equity."
Prediction markets offer a much-needed alternative, says Winton.
"We think that the set of derivatives that people have to actually express capital into a business is going to diversify in a very meaningful way. And prediction markets are going to serve as the vehicle by which that can happen."
"At maturity, prediction markets will allow equity capital markets to operate more efficiently and the businesses that are really likely to deliver the best long-term value to shareholders to actually capitalise more efficiently relative to how they are today."
The world's next breakthrough company
When asked for the company that Winton thinks could be the next OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX, Winton says in the latter's case, there isn't one.
"I don't think SpaceX is duplicable. There's only one SpaceX in the universe."
But the one name he puts forward is another Elon Musk vehicle, brain compute and interface company Neuralink. Like the other companies offering disruptive innovation, Neuralink could radically transform the way the world works, says Winton.
"As these AI systems become more and more performant, we need a high bandwidth way by which to communicate and control them," he says. "The vision for that company is to make brain compute interface as easy to get as a LASIK surgery to correct your eyesight."
"Right now they're delivering the ability to paralysed and profoundly physically disabled people to communicate and control computers. They're looking to provide what they call blindsight - the ability of people who are blind to be able to see."
While there's still much to be done, it clearly aligns with ARK's purview of backing the people and companies that could genuinely change the world.
"They have ambitions to scale this to where the capability will be accessible to basically anybody who wants it in the future. We'll see, but it's an exciting space."
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Tom is a Senior Investment Writer and Presenter at Livewire Markets, having worked as a writer and editor for 10 years, specialising in investing and personal finance.
He has previously worked at Finder, FourFourTwo and Man Of Many covering everything from film to football.
He has a Masters in Media Production and a Bachelor's in Journalism.
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Tom is a Senior Investment Writer and Presenter at Livewire Markets, having worked as a writer and editor for 10 years, specialising in investing and personal finance. He has previously worked at Finder, FourFourTwo and Man Of Many covering...
Expertise
Tom is a Senior Investment Writer and Presenter at Livewire Markets, having worked as a writer and editor for 10 years, specialising in investing and personal finance. He has previously worked at Finder, FourFourTwo and Man Of Many covering...
Expertise
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