Goodfin Wire #25: Salesforce $5.6B Acquisition, Family Office Reception, CRACKED Wealth, and Goodfin MCP

Tech Week is a wrap, and capital is chasing AI that already pays its way.

Salesforce is buying Braze for $5.66 billion at a 58% premium, Modal Labs raised $750 million at a $15.75 billion valuation after crossing $1 billion in run-rate revenue, Erebor is reportedly raising $1.5 billion with deposits above $7 billion, and Town hit a $1 billion valuation four months after launch. The signal: investors are paying up for AI with real revenue behind it, from infrastructure to agents.

Goodfin also just wrapped two weeks on the road: a CRACKED founders breakfast at SF Tech Week and then LA for Mission Critical: AI Meets Aerospace & Defense, the AI LAX Summit and the Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs reception. Here’s what we heard, plus the companies worth your attention. Let’s get into it.

→ On the Calendar — Family Office Cocktail Reception (October 22) and CRACKED Wealth (November 18).

→ In the Rearview — 14 days on the road: CRACKED at SF Tech Week, Mission Critical and the AI LAX Summit at LA Tech Week, and Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs.

→ Product News - Goodfin MCP for Claude & ChatGPT

→ From Goodfin AI — Salesforce buys Braze for $5.66B, Erebor tops $7B in deposits, Modal Labs hits a $15.75B valuation, and Town becomes a unicorn four months after launch.

→ Member Poll — What gives defense tech the winning edge?

To wind down Opal Group’s Annual Family Office & Private Wealth Management Forum – West, October 21-23, 2026, in Napa Valley, Goodfin is hosting a cocktail reception for a select group of next generation family office leaders to meet and discuss where tech investments are heading, and how to access companies and industries that align with office mandates.

If you’d like to learn more about our family office gatherings, please reply to this email or contact us here.

Goodfin and Viraj Ala, Silicon Valley’s Chief Cracked Officer, are bringing a curated group of founders and operators together for a candid discussion and AMA around exits, wealth, health, and what’s next. Come for the alpha, stay for the network, and leave with a special founder package of a complimentary QSBS diagnostic, 1:1 founder content speed session with Viraj Ala, and more. Limited seating. Don’t wait. This is going to be a good one.

Goodfin kicked off SF Tech Week with CRACKED, a founders breakfast at Marlowe where Viraj Ala moderated a closed-door chat with Niko Bonatsos (Verdict Capital) and Pramod Sharma (Napkin AI). With bellies full and minds charged, the energy was high.

Top founder takeaways: struggle vs suffering (if you’re struggling, keep going, if you’re suffering, pivot), gamify the nos (be comfortable with hearing no from investors), and do the boring paperwork early, from your 83(b) to your QSBS clock (this separates success from outcomes). Founders left with a complimentary QSBS diagnostic and CRACKED hot sauce. This was so popular, we’re running this back. Stay tuned on where you can get your sauce next!

From El Segundo to Playa Vista: two days, one question.

Who gets into the room, and what does it take to open the door wider?

That question shaped our LA Tech Week and our partnership with AI LA. It started on the aerospace corridor and ended on the Silicon Beach stage.

First, why we partnered with AI LA.

AI LA’s Executive Director, Heather Sit, put it plainly when we sat down with her. Her question is whether, once you get into the room, you build “the ladder, the ramp, the staircase,” or pull it up.

LA is the right city to ask it. Hollywood controls the narrative, but this city also runs on aerospace, defense, finance, ports, and communities that rarely share a stage. AI LA’s 30,000+ member ecosystem puts them in the same room.

Goodfin does the same thing for the most gated room there is: private capital. Heather said that if you don’t know what exists in private markets, you don’t know the full scope of what exists in the world. We’re building for the people who want to see it.

Here’s where we showed up:

Oct 14 | Mission Critical: AI + Aerospace + Defense Summit at SpaceWERX

With AI LA and SpaceWERX, we brought together leaders across AI, aerospace, defense, government, and venture. The goal was to unpack how AI moves from prototype to deployment in systems where failure isn’t an option. Across two panels: Mission Critical AI: Bringing AI Into Defense Operations and AI-Enabled Aerospace: From Engineering to Manufacturing and Operations, we learned the very real human decisions and frameworks that are crucial for successful AI integration. Performance, human (in the loop) as coordinator, and a new design paradigm shift are a few themes where guardrails and governance are being built in.

The line we’re still thinking about: “The most human aspect of AI is human life.” In defense, the conversation has moved from access to adoption, with governance and human judgment built in from day one, because human lives are at stake.

Oct 16 | AI LAX Summit: Culture Meets AI at Google’s Playa Vista Campus

This was a full day on how humans and AI agents will work together. Hundreds of developers, creators, founders, and policymakers came together across five tracks, from media and enterprise agents to governance and frontier infrastructure. Founder & CEO Anna Joo Fee spoke alongside leaders from Google, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Circle, Hasbro/Sixth Wall and a16z on enterprise agents, fiduciary oversight in the agentic era, frontier infrastructure and LA’s agentic economy.

Across these rooms, one thing was clear: the companies defining the next decade are being built inside ecosystems, long before most people see them coming. We’re inspired and bullish on being a part of LA’s.

As a Gold Sponsor, we joined founders, investors, and Stanford alumni for an evening of real conversations and a Startup Spotlight spanning ocean restoration, materials science, and women’s health. In collaboration with Morrison Foerster and fellow sponsors, it was an enlightening evening and a wonderful opportunity to connect with new and old friends. The perfect way to closeout LA Tech Week.

Bring Goodfin into Claude or ChatGPT

You can now connect your Goodfin account to Claude or ChatGPT and ask about your private market investments alongside the other apps you already use there.

Try asking:

“What deals are open on Goodfin right now, and what’s my minimum?”
“Walk me through the terms, fees and member sentiment on [deal].”
“Summarize my Goodfin portfolio.”

Your assistant can also combine your Goodfin data with your other connected apps. For example, it can add your positions to your investment spreadsheet, draft an email to your CPA listing what you’ve invested, or put upcoming Goodfin events on your calendar.

How to connect (ChatGPT): Open Plugins in the left sidebar > Add > Add custom MCP server. Name it “Goodfin,” paste mcp.goodfin.com/mcp as the Server URL, leave Authentication set to OAuth, then click Create and sign in with your Goodfin email and password.

The connection is read-only. Your assistant can see only your own information and can’t make changes. To invest, follow the link back to the deal page and complete it in the Goodfin app. Wire details stay in the Goodfin app.

Have Questions? Reply to this email or reach out to us here.

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

1. Salesforce bets $5.66 billion on Braze — and pays a 58.1% premium to do it. Salesforce is acquiring customer engagement platform Braze in an all-cash deal at $47.50 per share, a 58.1% premium to Braze’s previous closing price. The deal brings in Braze’s roughly 2,770 customers, including Canva, Venmo and Instacart, along with its real-time personalization and cross-channel messaging tools, which will plug into Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud. Rather than building these AI-driven engagement capabilities from scratch, Salesforce is buying established technology and pairing it with its own customer data. The deal is expected to close in Salesforce’s fiscal 2028, subject to approvals, and its FY2027 guidance remains unchanged. The real question for investors is whether integrating Braze can generate enough growth to justify the premium. Execution will matter more than the price tag. Read More

2. Erebor went from $1.1 billion to $7 billion in deposits in six months — now it needs capital to keep up. Erebor is the national bank Palmer Luckey and Joe Lonsdale built to fill the hole SVB left, and it opened in February. The FT reports it added more than $3 billion and 500+ customers last quarter, taking deposits past $7 billion, and it is raising $1.5 billion at an $8 billion pre-money valuation. The growth is what’s driving the raise: Erebor has to hold a 12% leverage ratio under its charter, so a balance sheet this size needs roughly $900 million of capital, and it had $597 million at the end of June. Along the way, it ended free at-par stablecoin redemption for everyone except big depositors after trading firms gamed the policy. Deposits are liabilities, not revenue. At the end of Q2, Erebor had made only about $78 million in loans and kept roughly 90% of its assets in cash at other banks. The Q3 call report lands by the end of October, and that’s the number to watch. Read More

3. Modal Labs raises $750 million at a $15.75 billion valuation — inference is where AI revenue is actually showing up. Modal Labs, a provider of cloud infrastructure for AI inference and other applications, secured $750 million in a Series D round led by Accel at a $15.75 billion valuation, and the New York-based company said it recently passed a $1 billion annual revenue run rate. That puts the round at roughly 16x run-rate revenue, a premium price but one backed by real dollars, not projections. Every AI agent, chatbot and copilot needs compute every time someone uses it, and Modal sells exactly that. It was also the week’s largest U.S. round in a stretch when investors scaled back on giant checks, a sign that capital is still flowing to infrastructure with proven revenue even as megadeals cool. Read More

4. Town hits a $1 billion valuation just four months after launch. The AI startup raised a $108 million Series B co-led by Menlo Ventures and Forerunner Ventures, with a16z and First Round Capital participating, bringing total funding to at least $160 million. Its AI assistants, called “Townies,” connect to 50+ workplace tools, from email and calendars to Slack and Salesforce, and can now coordinate tasks with one another across teams. Town is betting on organization-wide coordination rather than individual productivity. The real test is whether enterprises will trust AI to work across departments without compromising security or human oversight. Read More

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Members picked a lane. The verdict: data beats hardware.

66.7% — Proprietary Data. Sensors and datasets no one else has.

Two in three members say the edge isn’t the machine. It’s what the machine learns. Data compounds, and it’s the hardest asset to replicate.

33.3% — Defense & Infrastructure. Machines built for energy, defense, and battle.

A meaningful conviction bloc. Sovereign demand, long contracts, high barriers — the “mission-critical” thesis has believers.

0% — Autonomy Stack. Zero votes. The “brains” are getting commoditized in members’ eyes. Models move fast; moats don’t form around what everyone can build.

0% — Robots-as-a-Service. Zero votes. Business model, not moat. Members see RaaS as a pricing layer, not defensibility.

The takeaway: Members are underwriting scarcity, not software. The bet is on whoever owns the inputs — exclusive data or exclusive customers.

Being rich in 2026 looks like this:

Goodfin | Your inside track to elite private markets