Allie Garfinkle

Allie Garfinkle covers the people, capital, and technology that move private markets, with crypto treated as part of the broader dealmaking around AI and frontier startups.

Term Sheet and private capital deal flow

At Fortune, she is a senior writer and editor and serves as editor of Term Sheet, the flagship weekday newsletter tracking venture capital, private equity, and startup funding.

Term Sheet focuses on new funds, rounds, and exits, and her recent coverage includes exclusives on Laravel, an open source startup in Arkansas raising $57 million from Accel, and a detailed look at how VCs put $1.2 billion into insurtechs in a single quarter.

She regularly reports on software and infrastructure plays, from SaaS metrics in “Let’s talk about ARR” to Ambience Healthcare’s AI technology rollout at John Muir Health, using individual deals to explain how investors value recurring revenue and product-led growth.

Her newsletter and podcast work extends this deal-flow lens into audio and video, with a Term Sheet series that recaps the biggest funding news each week and brings on industry leaders to discuss private equity, venture capital, and startups.

Across these formats, she treats crypto deals as one strand in a larger tapestry of private-market capital formation, paying attention to who is backing them, how they fit into portfolios, and how they intersect with AI and infrastructure themes.

AI boom, infrastructure, and risk

Garfinkle’s reporting returns consistently to the AI boom, especially where it meets capital markets, infrastructure, and governance.

She has examined how retirement savings are exposed to AI concentration in “Your 401(k) is funding the AI boom,” tracing the way index weights, tech valuations, and investor behavior feed into everyday savers’ risk profiles.

Her work on OpenAI includes a deep dive into “rogue AI transcripts,” capturing internal directives such as “be transparent only if asked” to illustrate how corporate culture and safety norms evolve under investor and public pressure.

In another Term Sheet dispatch, she chronicles a week when “OpenAI punted, Anthropic stalled,” juxtaposing boardroom drama at major AI labs with excitement around an imminent IPO for Oura, a consumer-facing ring maker riding the same data and hardware trends.

Her longform feature on Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, framed as building “a defense against the dark side of AI,” explores how cybersecurity spending, corporate fear, and new products turn abstract AI risk into concrete business strategy.

The piece about Khosla and Andreessen Horowitz backing a startup that aims to reinvent mining for AI ties resource extraction and supply chains directly to the compute demands of the next generation of models, showing how physical infrastructure becomes a venture-backed asset class.

Across these stories, crypto appears when it touches AI infrastructure, data centers, and new hardware, treated less as a standalone beat than as part of a broader contest over who profits from computational scarcity.

Climate tech, health tech, and sector bets

Garfinkle often uses individual companies and deal rounds to illuminate sector pivots in climate tech, health tech, and consumer brands.

In her climate work, she reported that climate tech VC fundraising is down almost 40%, but that AI is driving deals, pairing funding data with conversations with investors such as Dawn Lippert and Mike Schroepfer on how to balance speed, emissions, and returns.

Her Ambience Healthcare piece follows the launch of the company’s AI technology at John Muir Health, using the deployment to show how clinical workflows, hospital budgets, and software investors interact in health tech.

On Term Sheet’s video series, she has sat down with Poppi’s cofounder Allison Ellsworth to unpack how a billion-dollar soda brand cracked the Gen Z code, turned fast-moving TikTok trends into durable demand, and why incumbents struggle to adapt.

Another installment adapts her coverage of Barnes & Noble into a broadcast format, exploring CEO James Daunt’s plan to save the bookseller and what that strategy reveals about private ownership, turnaround playbooks, and the role of investors in retail.

These sector pieces share a structure: a close look at one company’s choices and capital structure, paired with investor perspectives and data that place the story inside a wider market shift, whether in climate, health, consumer brands, or crypto-adjacent infrastructure.

Longform profiles, conferences, and broadcast work

Beyond daily deal coverage, Garfinkle writes longform magazine features and leads Fortune’s Brainstorm conference series, extending her beat from the page to the stage.

Her first cover story for the magazine profiled AI pioneer Demis Hassabis and Isomorphic Labs, tracing how advances in AI and drug discovery reshape timelines, funding needs, and partnerships between tech and pharma.

The Nikesh Arora feature, published in the October/November 2026 issue, combines biography with strategic analysis, following his path across telecom, Google, investing, and cybersecurity to explain how one executive’s network and risk appetite shape AI defense spending.

She co-chairs Brainstorm, a community and event series anchored by an annual retreat, and is a frequent moderator at major conferences such as SXSW, where she brings her private-markets perspective into live conversations with founders and investors.

Her broadcast work includes hosting the Term Sheet podcast and contributing regularly to BBC’s Business Matters, adapting her newsletter’s focus on private capital, startups, and crypto-adjacent innovation into audio discussions for a broader audience.

Earlier in her career, she covered Amazon, Google, and Meta and helped produce PBS Frontline business documentaries including “Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover” and “The Power of the Fed,” grounding her current crypto and private-markets coverage in a long-standing focus on how technology and finance collide.