Goodfin Wire - Vol. 13

We’re leaping into Spring with key events defining private markets.  

OpenAI just closed the largest private raise in history. Saronic more than doubled its valuation in under a year. Shield AI locked in $1.5B to scale autonomous defense. The capital isn't flowing — it's concentrating, and the companies catching it are the ones building infrastructure the next decade runs on. 

This edition puts you inside the signal — from our Supper Club in San Francisco to a new AI chip announcement to our founder’s take on why the next generation of financial companies will be defined by architecture, not headcount. Let’s go.

→ Supper Club: New York City—Private dinner for Premium and Reserve members in the Big Apple. April 29th. Seats are limited.
→ Goodfin at HumanX—Join us in San Francisco. We’re unveiling a new Chip.
→ Goodfin on Cheddar—Anna goes on air to discuss AI native architecture.
→ Pre-IPO News—SpaceX, OpenAI, Saronic and Shield AI. The market is pricing a world where AI runs defense systems and powers enterprise infra.

We’re hosting a curated evening with Goodfin members in New York City - a gathering around a private 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.

Join us at HumanX as we unveil our AI chip…giveaway! We put an AI chip in 5,000 conference bags at HumanX. Not the kind NVIDIA makes. Not the kind TSMC fabs. A poker chip — with two ways to win:

🎲 $1,000 cash. One winner, announced 10 days after the conference. Pick an AI or frontier tech company.

📅 IPO Prediction. Pick the first major company to go public in 2026. Everyone who calls it correctly will be entered to win one of five $100 gift cards — whenever it happens.

Flip the chip. Scan it. One screen. Four fields. Under 90 seconds. Place your chip.

Connect with us! Find us at HumanX or in the bag and enter to win.

Goodfin hosted its first members-only Supper Club of the year — a private evening at 7 Adams, a Michelin-starred restaurant in San Francisco. The format was simple: a curated table, a room of investors and operators, and a chef’s menu that spurred conversation.

Our CEO & Founder Anna Joo Fee shared the state of Goodfin and provided product and fund updates. Then the discussion moved from private markets to agentic AI, cybersecurity, upcoming IPOs, and the future when intelligence becomes infrastructure. Just the kind of exchange when conviction meets people who are building things.

We're already planning the second one in SF. If you want to be in the room, let us know and we’ll add you to the list for an early access announcement. Premium and Reserve members only.

The tools that built billion-dollar portfolios were never designed for you. They were built for institutions. For teams of 20. For seven-figure research budgets.

That's changing.

Goodfin recently sat down with Justine Miller at Cheddar to talk about what it really means to purpose-build AI for investing — not just layer a chatbot on top of a dashboard and call it innovation. The difference between generic AI and AI built with the underlying investments and financial product baked in. That's where the unlock happens.

The next generation of investors won't need a full team to make institutional-quality decisions. They'll need the right infrastructure. That is exactly what Goodfin is building.

We recently returned from Fintech Meetup, one of the largest global gatherings of fintech founders, banks, and investors shaping the next generation of financial services. On a panel of experts, our founder Anna discussed whether agentic AI can and will replace operations in financial services.

Her view: the real shift is reframing operations entirely. What we’ve historically called “ops” are really systems of decisions and workflows that lived in people because we couldn’t encode them. Today, AI enables us to design those systems explicitly as architecture.

This has broader implications. As workflows collapse and become embedded in technical architecture rather than delivered through intermediaries, organizational structure changes as does the end user experience. The next generation of financial companies will be defined less by headcount and more by how intelligently their systems are designed.

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

→ SpaceX confidentially files IPO paperwork, positioning the company one step closer to staging what could be the largest initial public offering of all time. SpaceX is aiming for an IPO that could raise between $40 billion and $80 billion, reported by The Wall Street Journal. The filing puts the company on track to potentially list shares by July, as Musk has told people is his goal. Read More

→ OpenAI closes record-breaking $122 billion funding round as anticipation builds for IPO, up from the $110 billion figure that was previously announced. This makes a post-money valuation of $852 billion and signals a public listing in H2 2026 that would give it the capital base to execute on a $1.4T infrastructure buildout spanning custom chips, data centers, and the Stargate project. Holding recent pressure aside — the company has retreated from large spending plans and shuttered products including its short-form video app Sora — OpenAI is positioning itself as the default AI stack for enterprise, government, and consumer at a scale no competitor has matched. Read More

→ Shield AI raises $1.5B at $12.7B valuation. Shield AI closed a $1.5 billion Series G led by Advent International and co-led by JPMorganChase, alongside $500 million in preferred equity from Blackstone, valuing the defense AI company at $12.7 billion. The raise will fund the acquisition of simulation software firm Aechelon Technology and continued development of Hivemind — its AI pilot platform already operating across 26 vehicle classes including F-16s and autonomous drones. Read More

→ Saronic raised $1.75B led by Kleiner Perkins at a $9.25B valuation. The U.S. is accelerating unmanned naval procurement to close the gap with China's shipbuilding capacity. The company is scaling to 20+ ships per year by 2027, expanding its Louisiana shipyard, and scouting a second facility in Texas — production infrastructure that positions Saronic as the manufacturing backbone of the autonomous surface vessel category at a moment when defense budgets are actively rotating toward cheaper, unmanned platforms. Read More

→ Databricks moves into the security market ahead of IPO. Databricks is introducing Lakewatch, a security information and event management service, to challenge mature cybersecurity vendors using generative AI and a pricing system that encourages clients to store lots of data. The acquisition of two cybersecurity technology startups seals the cybersecurity move as a long term bet, one that may help Databricks justify its $134 billion valuation to public investors ahead of a public offering. Early customers include Adobe and Dropbox. Read More

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