Brian Contreras
Brian Contreras is a finance reporter at Inc. magazine who follows how private capital, regulation, and technology shape modern businesses and the founders behind them. He leads coverage for Inc.’s Money vertical, writing about venture capital, private equity, debt, grants, crypto, fintech, and the broader financial system that supports high-growth companies. His work is built around deeply reported features and premium analysis that connect funding decisions to real-world outcomes for entrepreneurs and established firms.
Private Capital, Venture Funds, and the Money Beat
Contreras’s core beat is the flow of private capital into startups and growth-stage companies, and the consequences that follow.
He covers venture capital and private equity as interconnected systems, tracking how elite funds, private debt vehicles, and grant programs determine which businesses scale and which stall. His reporting on the concentration of power among a small circle of “Giga VCs” and the Big Six venture firms dubbed “G-FLATS” shows how billions in recent fundraising have given a handful of investors outsized influence over the next generation of powerhouse companies. In that work, he explains how cachet, media arms, and professional networks matter as much as capital, and what that means for founders choosing partners for their cap tables.
Inside Inc.’s Money section and Inc. Premium, he frequently writes guidance-driven features for entrepreneurs on topics like private debt, M&A, and fundraising strategy. Recent pieces include step-by-step coverage of how founders can use debt without jeopardizing their companies, as well as profiles of investors and executives whose financial decisions shape multibillion-dollar ventures. He also contributes to major Inc. packages such as the Inc. 5000 list, profiling CEOs whose fast-growing companies illustrate current trends in private business, from AI-driven workplace tools to modern family-run firms. Across these stories, his distinguishing trait is a focus on how specific financing structures and investor relationships alter the trajectory of individual businesses, not just the valuation numbers.
AI, Technology, and the Business of Innovation
Contreras brings a deep technology lens to his finance coverage, informed by his prior work reporting on artificial intelligence, creators, social media, and tech startups at another major outlet. At Inc. magazine, he covers the financial side of AI and tech infrastructure, including an investigation into an AI venture that has never turned a profit yet is targeting a $35 billion IPO, examining what its losses and ambitions reveal about today’s capital markets. He writes about AI fraud and security, detailing how companies like Pindrop and their business customers respond to increasingly sophisticated scams and what tools leaders can use to protect their firms.
His reporting on LinkedIn’s AI-driven recruitment tools and workplace automation explores how autonomous systems are reshaping hiring, resumes, and job search behavior.
Earlier work at other outlets shows the same blend of technology and human impact, including pieces on filmmakers using AI without apology, AI-made movies, and social-media-native creators building careers and shared houses around TikTok. He has reported on platforms’ responsibility for disinformation, such as coverage of Facebook’s handling of Spanish-language misinformation, and how those issues intersect with trust and regulation. At Inc. magazine he continues to connect AI and tech trends to business fundamentals, writing about disruption risk for startups in the AI age and how elite university programs like Stanford’s “Hacking for Defense” and entrepreneurship courses are shaping the next wave of founders.
Across this work, his through-line is to treat AI and tech as financial and strategic questions for businesses, not just product stories.
Founder Profiles and Unusual Business Stories
Contreras often uses narrative profiles to show how money, strategy, and personality come together inside a single company. He has followed an AI scheduling startup from its earliest stages through an accelerator program, documenting what raising capital and building product looks like in real time for a very young venture. His coverage of Inc. 5000 leaders includes founders like the CEO of Loop, an AI-driven business born out of experience at Uber, and the head of My CPA Coach, a fast-growing family business rooted in honoring a parent’s legacy.
These stories highlight both the technical and emotional stakes of entrepreneurial decision-making, and he treats both as part of the business case.
He also writes about consumer-facing founders who move between categories, such as his profile of Supergoop founder Holly Thaggard, exploring how seeing “white space” in sunscreen led to a successful brand and how she now applies that same mindset to bottled water. Other pieces follow niche or overlooked corners of commerce, like the business of selling football helmets, where he details how supply chains, safety regulation, and marketing collide in a market that can be more hard-hitting than the sport itself. He has profiled leaders behind an identity verification company built by a former terrorist hunter, illustrating how security expertise translates into a $2 billion enterprise.
Even when the subject is unexpected - such as a $60 million UFC event staged on the White House lawn - he frames the story around who funded it, what deals and relationships made it possible, and how those flows of money intersect with politics and public perception.
Regulation, Risk, and the Financial System
Another strand of Contreras’s beat is the machinery of financial regulation and fiscal policy, and how it touches entrepreneurs and investors. He covers developments at agencies such as the IRS, SEC, and Federal Reserve, along with taxes and tariffs, translating complex rule changes into clear implications for business owners. His reporting has examined how a “saaspocalypse” in the software sector is affecting M&A dealmaking, through interviews with Morgan Stanley executives and analysis of market data.
He has written on Dell’s overhaul of its sales compensation and commissions, breaking down what those changes signal about corporate strategy and labor costs.
He looks at individual financial shocks as case studies in risk, including losses in the net worth of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong during crypto crashes, to show how volatility in digital assets reverberates through companies and personal fortunes.
Coverage of FTC complaints about companies like Phia ahead of cookie-stuffing scandals underscores his attention to enforcement timelines and consumer protection in digital markets. He regularly connects these regulatory and market stories back to founders, arguing through his reporting that understanding tariffs, interest rates, and enforcement trends is now a prerequisite for scaling a business. Across all of these threads, Contreras’s work stands out for making capital flows, policy shifts, and complex financial instruments legible to readers who need to make decisions in a volatile environment.
4 more finance journalists.
Abigail Summerville
Abigail Summerville brings a leveraged finance background to her work covering consumer and retail mergers and acquisitions for Reuters. She reports on deal-making and capital markets across food, beverages, spirits, personal care, skincare, bath products and pet food. Her stories focus on transaction terms, ownership stakes, valuation, debt structures and funding sources. She often breaks news on potential sales and strategic reviews before formal announcements. Notable coverage includes Sazerac’s acquisition of Au Vodka, Blackstone’s exploration of a ZO Skin Health sale, CVC’s efforts to sell the parent of Dr Teal’s, and Colgate-Palmolive’s planned divestitures. She also covers consumer IPOs, including Jersey Mike’s and Black Rock Coffee, and co-writes Wall Street market reports. She joined Reuters in 2022 after three years covering leveraged finance and primary debt markets.
Adekunle Agbetiloye
Adekunle Agbetiloye is a senior reporter who connects capital flows, hard numbers and energy transition to the wider African economy. He works at Business Insider Africa, covering how money, technology and energy reshape economic growth, jobs and living conditions. His beat spans the African economy, technology, energy transition, climate change, startups and critical minerals, with a focus on concrete deals and data-led stories. He reports on African startup funding cycles, sovereign wealth funds, billionaire investors, multilateral and private investment programs, energy and power markets, Bitcoin mining, and economic policy choices. His work follows how governments finance spending, manage debt and respond to social pressure, and how sector snapshots and health and development metrics reveal links between macro indicators, corporate strategy and everyday costs.
Aimee Picchi
Aimee Picchi connects Social Security, retirement programs and economic policy directly to the financial security of ordinary Americans, showing how macro decisions hit household budgets. She is associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch at CBS News, covering business and personal finance with clear, accessible explanations of complex money issues. Her core beat is Social Security and retirement, interest rates and inflation, and how policy, markets and company strategies affect workers, retirees, savers and investors. She reports on benefit adequacy, looming Social Security cuts, COLA changes, Federal Reserve rate decisions, fuel costs, trade tensions and labor’s share of income, always framing coverage around pocketbook impacts. Her background includes retirement reporting fellowships, prior staff reporting on technology, media and business, an Institutional Investor book on affluent investors, and freelance work for national outlets. She also writes science fiction and fantasy and is a Nebula Award finalist.
Alex Harring
Alex Harring turns fast-moving market, economic and corporate developments into clear pre-market briefings that show what will matter when U.S. trading opens. He is a markets and economics reporter for CNBC’s digital platforms and writes Morning Squawk, a flagship daily newsletter that gives readers five key things to know before the stock market opens. His beat spans financial markets, investing, consumer trends and the U.S. economy, with coverage of central bank decisions, inflation, corporate strategy, sector moves and geopolitical shocks. He focuses on how policy, data and earnings shape equities, interest rates, currencies and investor positioning, linking price action with underlying drivers in real time and in reported features. Harring’s background reporting on corporate news, business and the economy across print, digital, broadcast and streaming informs his habit of connecting markets, companies and geopolitics in one frame.