Dominic-Madori Davis
Dominic-Madori Davis covers the financial side of venture capital and startups with a consistent focus on how race, gender, culture and politics shape who gets funded and who does not. She is a senior venture capital and startup reporter at TechCrunch, concentrating on the flow of capital into emerging companies and the investors behind them. Her coverage ties individual deals and funds to broader questions of access, power and representation in the startup ecosystem.
Venture capital, race and gender
Davis reports on venture firms and investors that place diversity at the center of their strategy, tracking how these funds raise and deploy capital.
Her piece on Harlem Capital raising a $150 million fund examines a firm explicitly focused on backing diverse founders and what a larger fund size means for its ability to execute that mission. She also highlights figures like Fearless Fund’s Arian Simone appearing at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, using profiles and event coverage to show how investors who champion underrepresented founders are navigating an industry under legal and cultural scrutiny.
Across these stories, she treats race and gender as structural forces in venture capital, not side notes, and links investor rhetoric to concrete fundraising targets, portfolio strategies and market positioning.
Startup funding and emerging sectors
A core part of Davis’s work is detailed reporting on funding rounds, valuations and acquisitions across a wide range of sectors. She has covered “co-warehouse” company Saltbox closing a $35 million Series B, digging into how logistics infrastructure plays into modern commerce and why investors are backing new warehouse models.
In her story on Kinhub’s plan to democratize employee wellness, she connects product design and workplace dynamics to the financing that allows such platforms to scale inside large organizations. Her coverage of Anthropic’s $400 million acquisition of biotech startup Coefficient Bio shows how AI companies are using major deals to expand into new scientific domains, and the size of the transaction underscores how aggressively capital is moving into this intersection.
On the fintech side, her article about payments startup Flutterwave reaching a $3.2 billion valuation backed by Ripple illustrates how she treats valuations, investor syndicates and regional growth as intertwined, especially when the company operates across markets that are still building out their financial infrastructure.
Across these stories, Davis breaks down round sizes, deal terms and investor participation with clarity, while staying close to what those numbers mean for founders’ runway and strategic options. She often uses a single company or transaction as the anchor, then broadens the frame to explain sector trends such as the rise of logistics platforms, wellness tools or cross-border payments infrastructure.
The result is funding coverage that serves both as a record of specific financial events and as a map of where venture money is concentrating at a given moment.
Culture, creators and Disrupt programming
Davis also writes about the intersection of culture, creators and startups, particularly through TechCrunch Disrupt programming.
Her preview of the “Consumer, culture, and creators” session with Erin and Sara Foster situates founder-storytelling and brand-building inside the broader creator economy, looking at how cultural figures leverage attention into funded businesses. In announcing Fearless Fund’s Arian Simone’s appearance at Disrupt 2024, she connects an investor’s personal narrative and advocacy to the themes and conversations that shape the conference agenda.
This strand of her work shows an interest in how celebrity, influence and cultural capital translate into deal flow, partnerships and new venture-backed companies.
These event-focused pieces complement her funding coverage by highlighting the personalities and public platforms that drive investor and founder interest. Rather than treating conferences as standalone happenings, she frames Disrupt programming as a reflection of where the industry is paying attention, especially around creators, consumer culture and diversity-focused investing. The tone stays anchored in concrete session topics and participants, with an emphasis on what those conversations signal about the direction of venture and startup culture.
Reporting style and formats
Davis primarily works in reported news and feature formats, drawing on interviews with founders, fund managers and executives to ground her coverage. Her author archive at TechCrunch shows a steady cadence of deal stories, fund announcements, sector deep dives and event previews, often clustered around venture capital and startup activity.
She tends to structure articles around a specific transaction, fundraise or company initiative, then uses those details to illustrate larger dynamics in finance, technology and culture.
Her framing is direct and fact-driven, with clear attention to financial specifics and the social context around them. Deal sizes, valuations and investor names sit alongside questions of who benefits from these flows of capital, especially founders and funds focused on underrepresented communities. This combination of venture finance detail with race, gender and culture as ongoing lenses is what distinguishes her coverage from more generic startup and funding reporting on the same beat.
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.