There's a specific moment in a software company's life that determines everything: the scale-up stage between $5M and $50M in ARR. Get it right, and you build a category leader and durable risk-adjusted value. Get it wrong, and you become another cautionary tale about growth that couldn't be sustained or expectations that could not be reasonably met.

Our own Phil Dur, who co-founded and leads PeakSpan, has lived inside that moment 43 times and counting.

We're thrilled to announce that Phil has been named to GrowthCap's Top Software Investors of 2025, joining an elite class of veteran investors recognized across the entire software industry this year.

Why It Matters

Now in its seventh year, the award evaluates nominees based on support from their firms, portfolio companies, and industry peers, followed by rigorous analysis of career trajectory, investing breadth, company scaling capability, recent investments and exits, and character.

The volume and caliber of nominees have risen steadily since the award's inception, reflecting growing awareness of the impact skilled investors have on software company outcomes, especially as AI reshapes competitive dynamics across every vertical.

PeakSpan has now earned five GrowthCap recognitions since its founding:

• 2025 Top Software Investors
• 2024 Top Growth Equity Firms
• 2024 Top 40 Under 40 Growth Investors
• 2023 Top Growth Equity Firms
• 2015 Top 40 Under 40 Growth Investors

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That track record reflects something foundational: a commitment to specialization, discipline, risk-adjusted value creation, and an ethos centered on partnership that has remained consistent across market cycles, laying the foundation for the consistent outcomes we have delivered for our entrepreneurial and LP stakeholders alike.

What Phil’s Three Decades of Software Investing Looks Like

Phil brings nearly 30 years of software investment experience to PeakSpan, gained through 43 board roles spanning multiple market environments, technology innovation cycles, and business model evolutions. Since founding PeakSpan in 2015, he's scaled the firm to over $2.5 billion in AUM across four funds, with every fund significantly oversubscribed.

The performance metrics tell a compelling story: top-quartile or decile performance across all funds and metrics, combined with an industry-leading realized capital loss rate of less than 3%, signaling disciplined capital deployment and exceptional risk-adjusted value creation (and realization).

But his (and the firm’s) real differentiator is focus. PeakSpan invests exclusively in B2B software companies, supporting them in their scale-up journey from $5M to $50M+ ARR, concentrating on 12 specific vertical sectors, including Customer Experience Management, Cyber & Digital Infrastructure, Digital Health, EdTech, FinTech, GTM Tech, Hospitality Tech, Human Capital Management, Next-Gen Commerce, Payments, PropTech, and Supply Chain. Phil personally leads investing efforts in Customer Experience Management and Human Capital Management.

This specialization enables expertise and pattern recognition that generalist strategies simply cannot develop.

Portfolio Outcomes That Validate the Model

Recent PeakSpan portfolio successes illustrate what a focused, experienced partnership means:

• XOi: $230 million financing led by KKR Growth (2025)
• Onboard: Acquisition generating triple-digit IRR (2024)
• Cloudbeds and Epignosis: Each achieved approximately 10x+ growth with over $300 million raised from top-tier investors, including Insight Partners and SoftBank

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The PeakSpan platform and system have been created to help entrepreneurs navigate the most challenging stage of company building (the scale-up journey – graduating from viable to valuable) with clarity, confidence, and control.

Built to Support Scale-Up Entrepreneurs

Phil has built infrastructure specifically designed to support entrepreneurs through the scale-up journey. He led the development of the PeakSpan Expert Community, a network of over 400 seasoned domain and functional experts who provide hands-on operational support to portfolio companies. He also helped develop PeakSpan's family of proprietary technology platforms, tools that have earned four issued patents from the USPTO and deliver real-time company intelligence, market analytics, and workflow automation.

This combination of human expertise and technological leverage creates what PeakSpan calls "infrastructure for smart, durable scale." It's the reason the firm has achieved exceptional growth trajectories, lasting stakeholder outcomes, and high referenceability across entrepreneur partnerships.

Founders choose PeakSpan because of how the team shows up, what they bring to complex decisions, the expertise and operational support that drives conviction in scaling, and who they become as partners through the hard moments.

In His Own Words

I'm grateful to GrowthCap for this recognition alongside an outstanding group of peers I deeply respect. This honor reflects the dedication of our exceptional team, whose relentless pursuit of our mission continues to drive us forward; the incredible execution of our visionary founders who are building category-defining companies and have chosen PeakSpan as their trusted partner; and the commitment of our amazing LP stakeholders whose support makes our work possible.      

– Phil Dur, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at PeakSpan Capital

Please join us in congratulating Phil on this recognition. If this resonates with you, we'd be honored if you'd share this post with your network and help celebrate the work being done to support software entrepreneurs building for the long term.

You can read Phil's full profile and learn more about GrowthCap's Top Software Investors of 2025 here.