Goodfin Wire #24: Instinct's $10B Valuation, Physical AI Bulls, Tech Weeks by a16z, and GO Shortlisted

SF Tech Week kicked off this week, and the agent layer is getting priced in.

Instinct quadrupled to a $10 billion valuation in a month, John Doerr backed photonics startup Volantis with $88 million, SoftBank is buying DigitalBridge for $3.1 billion and a16z valued EliseAI at $4 billion. The bigger signal: capital is moving past the models and into the agents and infrastructure that put AI to work.

Meanwhile, Goodfin is beginning its Tech Week tour. We kick off in San Francisco with a CRACKED founders breakfast on Oct 8, then head to LA for AI LA’s Aerospace & Defense Summit, Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs cocktail reception, and AILAX Summit. Fresh off the QSBS Summit in Jackson Hole and the Physical AI Summit in San Francisco, we’re bringing founders, investors and operators into the same rooms up and down California. Let’s get into it.

→ On the Calendar —CRACKED in SF (Oct 8), Mission Critical in LA (Oct 14), then the AI LAX Summit and Stanford Angels reception (Oct 16).

→ In the Rearview — QSBS Summit in Jackson Hole, Dirty Jobs Physical AI Summit, and Fintech is Femme Leadership Summit.

→ Goodfin News - Goodfin GO is shortlisted for BankingTech Awards Wealth & Investment category.

→ From Goodfin AI — Instinct quadruples to a $10B valuation in a month, John Doerr backs photonics startup Volantis with $88M, SoftBank buys DigitalBridge for $3.1B, and a16z values EliseAI at $4B.

→ Member Poll — What is the moat for Physical AI?

Goodfin and Viraj Ala, Silicon Valley’s Chief Cracked Officer, are bringing a curated group of founders and builders together for a candid fireside chat and AMA with Nico Bonatsos, Founder & Managing Director, Verdict Capital, and Pramod Sharma, CEO & Founder, Napkin AI. Come for the alpha, stay for the network, and leave with a special founder package of a QSBS diagnostic, founder content session with Viraj Ala Media, and more. We’re oversubscribed and the waitlist is open, but if you’re here as part of the Goodfin community, message us and we’ll see what we can do to bring you in.

Goodfin is partnering with AI LA and THE BR-DGE x DTI to convene leaders across AI, aerospace, defense, government and venture to dig into how AI moves from prototype to deployment in mission-critical systems. The stage is being set for conversations around autonomy, advanced manufacturing, government procurement, dual-use tech and the capital behind the sector. Join to access the inner workings of what it takes to lead, build, and invest in next gen infrastructure.

Goodfin is a Gold Sponsor of the Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs of Southern California’s cocktail reception, presented by Morrison Foerster, at a private Westside estate during LA Tech Week. Expect Landmark Vineyards wine, Solisca tequila and a live sushi station, plus demos from the Startup Spotlight cohort and remarks from Margaret Coblentz, co-founder of Capital F, on their debut fund. Space is limited and attendance is by application, with preference for angel and VC investors, funded founders and Stanford alumni.

Goodfin is a partner of the AI LAX Summit, a full day during LA Tech Week on how humans and AI agents will work together. Builders, founders, investors, creatives, policymakers and technical leaders will dig into AI for everyday life, enterprise agents, governance and fiduciary oversight in the agentic era, frontier infrastructure and the venture capital powering LA’s agentic economy. The day opens with agentic AI workshops and demos, then moves through a startup alley, keynotes, panels and fireside chats before closing with an evening reception. Grab your seat and join us.

We recently joined some of the country’s leading QSBS experts in Jackson Hole for the QSBS Summit—a gathering of CPAs, attorneys, tax professionals, and others working at the forefront of Section 1202.

The conversations got technical quickly—which reflects just how complex QSBS can be. We dug into open questions, evolving interpretations, and how the industry can help founders and investors better understand and maximize the potential tax benefits of QSBS.

For Goodfin, it was especially valuable as we continue to grow our QSBS Fund with CapGains and expand the tools we’re building around QSBS. This week, we’re launching a new product for founders that enables startups to run a diagnostic QSBS eligibility assessment—helping them understand their potential QSBS status earlier and more systematically.

Founders: Want to see whether your startup may qualify for QSBS? Take the Goodfin QSBS diagnostic here.

We were on the ground at Dirty Jobs 2026, VSC Ventures' Physical AI Summit that brought together 300 founders and funders across robotics, manufacturing, logistics, infrastructure, energy, defense, and mobility.

Previous editions focused on tech for the trades, but 2026 went deeper, into the underlying models and the applications built on them. With Applied Intuition co-founder Peter Ludwig, Rhoda AI CEO Jagdeep Singh, Mayfield's Navin Chaddha, and Dyna CEO Lindon Gao, the stage reflected the shift.

The sentiment: bullish, with discipline. The capital agrees. Physical AI raised $47.4B across 521 deals in H1 2026. According to Crunchbase, that's more than the $41.9B the category raised across 2022–2024 combined. With the U.S. short 2.5 million trade workers, the demand is there.

If software ate the world. Physical AI is rebuilding it. And looks like THE private-market opportunity.

Our founder Anna recently spoke at the Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit in San Francisco about how AI is changing the economics of building, hiring, and scaling companies.

One of the biggest themes: as AI makes execution faster and cheaper, outcomes matter more. Traditional roles are converging, and the differentiator is increasingly about the judgment to know what matters, what “good” looks like, and whether the work actually drives results.

Our takeaway: AI gives founders and teams extraordinary leverage, but context, judgment, and accountability remain scarce and more valuable than ever. And the metrics for success should be measured by business outcomes rather than task execution or token usage, for example.

GO, Shortlisted!

Goodfin Go has been shortlisted for Best AI Solution in Investment & Wealth Management at the 2026 Banking Tech Awards, hosted by FinTech Futures. Now in their 27th year, the awards recognize the most innovative players in fintech and banking technology. Other category nominees include Wealth.com, Intellect Design Arena, Trading Central, Liquidity, and Freedom24. Winners will be announced at the awards ceremony on December 3, 2026, at Hilton Park Lane in London. Thank you to our members for helping us build something worth recognizing!

The signal that matters surfaced for you. Here's what our AI pulled from the noise this week:

1. Instinct goes from $2.5 billion to $10 billion in a month — Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue are betting on AI that does your chores. Instinct raised $1 billion from investors including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Coatue at a $10 billion valuation, only a month after a raise that valued it at $2.5 billion. The pitch is instantly relatable: an AI agent that books travel and restaurant reservations, pays bills, cancels subscriptions and orders groceries for you. Quadrupling in 30 days for a product that only launched its invite-only service in August 2026 tells you where late-stage money is heading: the agent layer, where AI stops chatting and starts doing. Read More

2. John Doerr backs Volantis with $88 million — the next AI bottleneck isn't chips, it's memory. Volantis, a photonics-based AI inference startup, raised an $88 million Series A co-led by Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures, with John Doerr participating alongside angels including Dwarkesh Patel. Instead of copper wires, the company uses lasers to link computing chips to memory chips, a fix for the so-called memory wall that slows down large models. The valuation wasn't disclosed, but the comparables are telling: Ayar Labs raised $500 million at a $3.8 billion valuation for its optical interconnect technology. With first customer deliveries planned for 2027, this is an early bet on the picks-and-shovels layer that will decide how fast and cheap AI gets. Read More

3. SoftBank buys DigitalBridge for $3.1 billion — Masayoshi Son is buying the landlord of the AI boom. SoftBank completed its acquisition of DigitalBridge, a global alternative asset manager focused on digital infrastructure, for approximately $3.1 billion. The real prize is the portfolio: more than $108 billion in assets under management, including stakes in Switch, Vantage Data Centers and Yondr Group. Rather than buying data centers one at a time, SoftBank bought the firm that owns and finances them. Expect more strategic buyers to target infrastructure managers as AI demand for power, fiber and compute keeps climbing. Read More

4. Andreessen Horowitz values EliseAI at $4 billion — the AI answering your apartment inquiry just became a unicorn several times over. EliseAI, which deploys AI for the home rental industry, raised $350 million at a $4 billion valuation in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, and is now expanding into healthcare. Anyone who has messaged a leasing office lately has likely talked to software like this without knowing it. The lesson for private markets: some of the most durable AI value is being built in everyday, labor-heavy industries, close to real revenue. Read More

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Split across the board — with a story about what it takes to bet on the weather.

40% said independent scientific validation. Prove the rain wouldn’t have fallen anyway.

40% voted long-term government contracts. When a water agency signs on for years, demand stops being a pitch and starts being a backlog.

The remaining 20% - lower cost per acre-foot, betting that once rain is cheaper than the alternatives, the market follows.

What nobody picked is just as loud: not one vote for proven scale across regions.

The takeaway? You’re not asking Rainmaker to get bigger. You’re telling us credibility comes first — independent science and a committed buyer — before more ground covered means anything!

My ride or die in 2026🫡🫡🫡. Watch and wait until the end.

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