Goodfin Wire - Vol. 12

This week confirmed the blueprint for the industry.

Jensen Huang just told the world that agents are the new platform. A startup that cools chips crossed a $1.6B valuation. Enterprise and defense contracts are the new battleground for AI. These aren't isolated data points. They're the architecture of what comes next, and the people who recognize it early are the ones who end up on the right side of it. 

This edition puts you inside the signal: a Deal Room you won't want to miss, our Founder shaping AI and finance, and three private market bets the community is actively breaking down. Let’s go.

→ Supper Club: San Francisco—Private Michelin-starred dinner for Premium and Reserve members. March 25th. Seats are limited.
→ Goodfin at Fintech Meetup and HumanX—We’re on the road. First stop: Vegas. If you're attending, connect with us.
→ Deal Room Recap: Inside Dyme—Omnipod's founding team walked us through the world's smallest insulin pump. Recording is live on the platform.
→ Member Spotlight: Holly Li—$5.5B+ in transactions, convenience retail real estate, and what she's watching next.
→ Anna on the Female Founder 500—Inc. recognizes our Founder in one of the most competitive years yet.

We’re hosting a curated evening with Goodfin members in San Francisco - a gathering around a private Michelin-starred table for dinner, conversation, and exchange of signals. The format is simple: good food, the right people, and conviction. Limited spaces available. This is exclusively for Premium and Reserve members only.

Goodfin will be on stage at Fintech Meetup 2026, one of the largest global gatherings of fintech founders, banks, and investors shaping the next generation of financial services.

Our founder, Anna Joo Fee, will be speaking on the panel “Can agentic startups win by replacing ops, not just scaling them?” This will be a candid conversation focused on one of the biggest shifts happening in fintech today: AI systems that don’t just assist teams, but actually run core workflows.

The discussion will explore how agentic AI is transforming financial services by automating operational layers like research, analysis, and execution — and what it takes to build companies that are AI-native from the ground up.

If you’re attending Fintech Meetup, come to the panel and say hello — we’d love to meet you in person.

Join us at HumanX 2026 where 6,500 AI leaders, builders, and investors will converge in San Francisco for four days to connect and shape the future of industry.

We'll be on the ground all week. If you're attending, reach out — we'd like to connect.

And while we're there, we're running something special for the community.

The IPO window on late-stage AI companies is closing faster than most people realize. We want to know which company you think will reach it first. If your conviction call hits, you may walk away with a piece of it.

More details dropping before the conference. Watch this space.

Chris Hanson, CEO & Co-Founder of Dyme, gave members a front-row seat to the company building what could be an existential threat to the $20B Omnipod franchise. The core thesis: Dyme's CTO co-founded and invented the original Omnipod over 20 years ago. The team built a pump that's a quarter of the volume, half the height, a third of the weight—with the same insulin capacity. No clinical trials required. 510(k) pathway. FDA submission targeted for 2027, with commercialization to follow.

Chris walked through the competitive landscape and didn't hold back—pointing out that competitors have spent over $1B trying to challenge Omnipod and largely failed, with several abandoning their programs entirely. He broke down the exit landscape (Medtronic, Tandem, Insulet, Lilly, Dexcom, Abbott are all potential acquirers) and shared that strategic interest has already surfaced at the Series A stage. This round is to accelerate VNV testing, begin next-gen development (a combined pump + CGM), and strengthen their IP portfolio.

The deal is QSBS-eligible. The recording is live on the platform. T

Our founder Anna recently spoke at an invite-only roundtable at the Milken Institute Future of Finance in Washington D.C., where the Institute convened top regulators, policymakers, financial institutions, and technology leaders to discuss one of the most important shifts underway in our industry: the role of AI in financial services.

The discussion revolved around Anna’s simple but profound question:

What happens to financial institutions when financial expertise becomes software?

At Goodfin, this is the fundamental transformation we’re building around every day. We believe the next generation of financial platforms will be integrated across three key layers of what we call the AI financial stack:

• Intelligence — purpose-built AI systems that increasingly automate workflows

• Infrastructure — the regulated plumbing of finance

• Access — the underlying financial products or services.

For more of Anna’s thought leadership on AI and finance, updates on what we are building at Goodfin, and to join the discussion, follow us on LinkedIn.

The platform has a new look. As we've built AI deeper into the product, we reorganized the layout to enhance the experience and make it more personalized — navigation moves to the top to make it easier to move between pages, and the home page now provides suggestions based on your interests.

The more you use it, the sharper it gets. Every interaction helps the AI surface more relevant insights, deals, and updates — so the platform works harder for you over time.

We’re proud to share that Goodfin founder Anna Joo Fee has been named to Inc. Magazine’s 2026 Female Founders 500.

This was one of the most competitive years in the program’s history, with nominees advancing through multiple rounds of rigorous editorial review. The Female Founders 500 recognizes women who have moved forward with vision, resolve, and grit to lead their organizations to new heights. This year’s honorees span tech, healthcare, beauty, wellness, media, and more, forming an exceptional community of founders shaping the future of their industries. The impact of this group is enormous: $12.3B in revenue generated in 2025 and $12.2B in funding raised to date.

We’re honored to see Anna included among this elite group of women driving change — and grateful to the entire Goodfin community for your support for our business and mission. ⭐

Her lens on the market right now: convenience retail is undergoing a quiet transformation. "Not all convenience real estate is created equal. Cap rates are compressing for top-tier national tenants and operators while widening for legacy formats." The divergence is real, and it's accelerating.

When it comes to red flags in deals, Holly's filter is simple — cash flow discipline. "The toughest deals for me to walk away from are the ones with phenomenal dirt but cash flow that's too flat or negative." Below-market escalations, tenant-friendly options, convoluted co-tenancy clauses — all tests of conviction. Her rule: let a few trades establish a floor before jumping in, or it becomes an expensive lesson.

Outside of real estate, she's watching alternative investments broadly — AUM projected to exceed $32 trillion by decade's end. But within that, she's drawn to traditional companies reinventing themselves for the digital infrastructure era. "I might not pick the winners in the AI race, but betting on the underlying digital infrastructure is a high-conviction play." And the next disruption she has her eye on? Quantum computing.

We're curating the minds shaping the moment. If that's you, or someone in your circle, let's talk.

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

→ OpenAI to sell AI to US agencies through Amazon cloud unit. OpenAI just secured a Pentagon contract for classified and unclassified government AI work, routed through AWS. The deal signals that access to defense contracts, particularly through cloud providers already embedded in federal systems, is becoming the defining battleground in the AI industry. Read More

→ NVIDIA just sent another signal that AI agents are going to be everywhere. Nvidia's annual GTC conference just became the loudest signal yet that the AI agent era is here. Jensen Huang unveiled a full hardware and software pivot — new computing racks, OpenClaw integrations, and a $1T revenue target through 2027 — built around one bet: agents are the new platform. Read More

→ Anduril joins list of key Army suppliers, wins $20 billion contract. A $20B single contract replacing 120+ separate deals signals something beyond procurement efficiency. The Pentagon is consolidating its drone and counter-drone architecture around one vendor — that's a structural moat, not just a revenue line. Anduril's position inside the defense stack just became significantly harder to displace. Read More

→ Frore, a deep tech chip startup, becomes a unicorn. Frore Systems just closed a $143M Series D at a $1.64B valuation. The company doesn't make chips, it keeps them from melting, building liquid-cooling systems for AI hardware. As AI compute demands push hardware to its thermal limits, the cooling stack is quietly becoming foundational infrastructure. Read More

→ SpaceX reaches a new satellite milestone. SpaceX is on the cusp of having more than 10,000 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit simultaneously — a milestone reached less than seven years after its first launch in 2019. The infrastructure buildout behind that network is exactly the kind of picks-and-shovels bet worth watching as satellite connectivity becomes foundational to the AI era. Read More

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