A Decade of Innovation

A decade ago, ARK Invest started when the innovation platforms around which we centred our research and investing were nascent. The Model S had debuted but was among the most expensive cars on the road, and autonomous robotaxis were nowhere on Tesla’s product roadmap. Humanoid robots often toppled over and rockets never landed. Language was considered off-limits for artificial intelligence, and GPUs were little more than PC gaming chips. Bitcoin’s “market cap” was $6 billion and Coinbase had fewer than a million active customers. Companies focused on CRISPr gene editing were new to the public market scene and, while the cost to sequence a whole human genome had dropped to $1,000, its clinical utility was still questionable.

The capital markets and macroeconomic environment were very different as well, as shown below. In 2014, global nominal GDP7 had topped $70 trillion, higher than the $50 trillion in global equity market cap, of which disruptive innovation was only ~$6 trillion.

Note: “CAGR”: Compounded Annual Growth Rate. *We include cryptocurrencies and crypto assets in disruptive innovation capitalisation. **Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet. Source: ARK Investment Management LLC, 2025. This ARK analysis draws on a range of external data sources as of December 31, 2024, which may be provided upon request. For informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any particular security. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Forecasts are inherently limited and cannot be relied upon.

A decade later, the landscape is different. The economy is bigger—nearly $130 trillion—but capital markets have grown faster and are roughly equal to GDP in size. Innovation assets have appreciated faster still, and at $27 trillion make up more than 20% of the global equity market capitalisation.¹

Now, an electric vehicle is the world’s best-selling car, and autonomous robotaxis have commercialised in multiple cities. SpaceX rockets nearly always land, and humanoid robots that imitate human movement have found their first customers. Language has become the dominant interface for artificial intelligence systems that are surpassing the knowledge of experts across many domains, and AI is driving unprecedented demand for GPUs and computation. The cryptoasset market cap now exceeds $3 trillion, and Coinbase has more customers than all but three US banks. A CRISPr Cas-9 gene-editing cure for sickle cell disease has commercialised, and oncologists are prescribing hundreds of thousands of sequencing-based cancer detection tests annually.

After a remarkable decade of innovation, we believe the next five years will prove more meaningful, as detailed in ARK’s “Big Ideas 2025” released this week. Robotaxis should become a dominant form of passenger transportation, potentially creating an industry worth trillions in annual spending. Humanoid robots will be performing rudimentary chores in households while accelerating the rate of production in factories meaningfully. Artificial intelligence could approach $10 trillion in annualised revenues and command $10s of trillions in market capitalisation. Even while still early in their disruption of financial markets, cryptocurrencies and smart contracting protocols also could command $10s of trillions in value. In health, other diseases will have been cured, with many more cures in pipeline, while diagnosing and developing treatments for diseases will likely be much more efficient and more profitable.

If our research on these breakthroughs is correct, the enterprise value of innovators could increase at a stunning rate while that of companies left behind could shrink. According to our forecasts, disruptive innovation could account for more than two-thirds of the global equity market capitalisation in 2030. Despite a productivity-driven acceleration in macroeconomic growth, the value of companies not innovating could shrink as technology drives costs down and disrupts existing business models.

We also expect the bull market in innovation to broaden out to many companies. In the past five years, a handful of companies—the so-called Mag 6—have increased from one-third to two-thirds of the equity market’s innovation capitalisation. During the next five years, while in the aggregate the Mag 6 should continue to perform well, our forecasts suggest that disruptive competitors will grow faster, returning the Mag 6 to its pre-Covid share of the innovation market cap, as shown below.

Source: ARK Investment Management LLC, 2025. This ARK analysis draws on a range of external data sources as of December 31, 2025, which may be provided upon request. For informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any particular security. Forecasts are inherently limited and cannot be relied upon. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

Yes, those large well-known technology companies could continue to grow rapidly, but our forecasts suggest that more agile, aggressive, and disruptive companies will accrue value more rapidly, creating a historic technological business cycle.