PeakSpan Named One of GrowthCap’s 2026 Private Equity Firms of the Year

Eleven years, four funds, and eight GrowthCap recognitions later, the market has changed tremendously. Our conviction about what entrepreneurs need from a growth partner has not.

The market that an Applied AI B2B software entrepreneur faces in 2026 is unlike anything we’ve seen in the last decade.

Geopolitical strife, the SaaSpocalypse, and AI have introduced a new layer of uncertainty, exposing how fragile the growth-at-all-costs business model truly is and how markets may evolve over the medium- to long-term. Yet into that environment, capital has continued to pour.

The global software market has grown to $1.2 trillion. $425 billion flowed into venture and growth investing last year alone, with AI startups capturing nearly half of it.

The hard truth underneath all of this abundance is brutal, as the majority of startups continue to fail, never returning capital to their investors. Over the last decade, companies that raised both a Series A and Series B faced a failure or capital loss rate above 52%.

At PeakSpan, it’s our view that this flood of capital has not eliminated failure; it has made choosing the right partner and capitalization strategy even more consequential.

The entrepreneurs who choose PeakSpan make decisions every day about how to scale their organizations, balancing discipline with growth without losing sight of what made their businesses work from day one. They have built real products, found durable product-market fit, and reached the moment when their next decisions matter more than ever.

The rigor of thousands of decisions, made well, combined with the conviction and commitment of our team of 31, has earned PeakSpan recognition among GrowthCap’s Top Private Equity Firms of 2026.

Here is what I had to say about it in GrowthCap’s announcement:

“We’re honored to be named among GrowthCap’s Top Private Equity Firms, alongside peers we greatly admire. Eleven years ago, we founded PeakSpan on a simple bet: entrepreneurs deserve to feel like their success is inevitable, not aspirational.

That thesis holds because of the people making it happen: a team of leaders (most of whom grew up in this firm) with exceptional discipline executing our mission, who know their sectors better than any generalist or model ever could.

It also holds because our founders continue to trust us with their life’s work, and our LPs to be stewards of their capital and drive the best risk-adjusted outcomes, which matters more than ever.”

This marks the eighth GrowthCap award PeakSpan and members of our team have received, and we’re deeply grateful for each one. To us, this year’s recognition signals something bigger about the strategy we have pursued with remarkable consistency since our founding:

• Since 2015, PeakSpan has grown from a $150 million debut fund to an $831 million Fund IV, increasing fund size ~17x in that time period
• Our average profile of every portfolio partnership at entry has remained remarkably consistent at roughly $6-7 million in ARR with triple-digit growth
• As we have grown, we have invested more deeply in serving that entrepreneur rather than moving upstream from them, and we’ve done so without changing the core tenants that shape our identity.

Our strategy has evolved but has not changed at the core as it was purpose-built for this segment of the market: one where uncertainty is high, execution windows are shorter, and entrepreneurs need now more than ever a disciplined partner who can help them maintain optionality and reach a meaningful outcome faster than the market can move against them.

In ~60 partnerships spanning four funds, our realized capital loss rate is less than 2.5% (just three realized loss events in our history) compared with an industry benchmark above 50% at the Series A/B stage.

That discipline has produced top-quartile or -decile performance across our fund vintages. In our portfolio, XOi grew 6x in revenue during our partnership and completed a $275 million KKR recapitalization. Other examples include Cloudbeds, which grew revenue by 35x, and Cognism, which grew ARR by 30x (and counting) over the duration of our partnership.

In the aggregate, we've helped our portfolio partners reach an estimated combined enterprise value of nearly $8 billion and generate nearly $800 million in aggregate revenue over the course of our partnerships.

We believe AI is not only changing software, but also what entrepreneurs should expect from their investors. Large language models are themselves generalists. Genuine vertical depth, earned through years of watching the same $5 million to $50 million ARR journey unfold, is more difficult to replicate along with the platform that serves as the engine for that growth.

That depth multiplies across partnerships, categories, and cycles. But the metric we may care about most is the hardest to earn: high entrepreneur referenceability across virtually every partnership in our history.

The market around us has changed enormously since 2015, but our conviction about what entrepreneurs deserve from an investment partner has not.

So while being recognized among GrowthCap’s Top Private Equity Firms of 2026 and receiving our eighth GrowthCap recognition means a great deal to us, what we feel most is gratitude.

Our gratitude belongs to the entrepreneurs who have trusted us with businesses they spent years building, the limited partners who have backed this strategy across four funds, the experts and operators who have strengthened it, and the team that continues to choose depth over breadth.

Read GrowthCap’s full announcement and methodology here.