PeakSpan Named to Inc.’s 2026 Founder-Friendly Investors List

The annual list recognizes private equity, venture capital, and lending firms with strong track records of supporting founder-led businesses

We’re proud to share that, for the first time, we’ve been named to Inc.’s 2026 Founder-Friendly Investors list. The list recognizes private equity firms, venture capital firms, and lenders with demonstrated track records of supporting founder-led companies, and includes us among 294 firms across the investment landscape.

The Founder-Friendly Investors list celebrates investors and firms that work closely with entrepreneurs and remain engaged with the businesses they back. Honorees are recognized for their approach to partnering with founders and supporting their companies through growth and beyond.

“With the current funding environment and rapid changes facing growing companies, founders are looking for more than just capital from their investors. They want true partners who believe in their business, but who are also able to provide the critical advisement and strategic support they need to reach their potential,” says Bonny Ghosh, editorial director at Inc. “The 2026 Founder-Friendly Investor awards celebrate those firms –– the ones committed to partnership, excellence, and helping founder-led companies grow.”

“Our first recognition on Inc.’s Founder-Friendly Investors list means a lot, and our team deserves full credit for it. They’re working toward a very particular verdict from our entrepreneurs: ‘PeakSpan delivered on what they promised, and then some.’ When someone has trusted you with their life’s work, the ‘and then some’ is the most important part of the commitment,” said Phil Dur, our Co-Founder and Managing Partner.

Since founding PeakSpan in 2015, we have built our firm around a very specific entrepreneur: someone who has built a software scale-up anywhere from $3 to $15 million in revenue in market segments that venture capital has often overlooked, often with little outside capital, and wants to build the next consequential business that could become a category leader while protecting what they have already created. Rather than pursue “growth at all costs,” we help these entrepreneurs build ambitious businesses iteratively through a series of strategic milestones that minimize failure risk and give them more agency to define what success looks like, all while preserving their options. And we have kept playing the same sport: since founding, we have grown to approximately $2.6 billion in AUM, while investing more deeply in serving that entrepreneur, with our investment professionals concentrating exclusively in two to three applied AI software sectors and bringing accumulated experience in pricing, hiring, product expansion, and go-to-market execution that propels our portfolio partners forward and benefits the next entrepreneur.

In practice, our work begins before an investment: we typically spend about a year alongside an entrepreneur, completing five or six projects without fees or obligation so entrepreneurs can experience our ‘product’ as a prospective partner and our partnership before inviting us into something they have worked so hard to build. From our perspective, partnerships are defined in the moments between writing the first check and celebrating the ultimate exit. After investment, our “portfolio of one” approach gives each portfolio partner a dedicated team of at least three to four investment professionals who are studied in your market, business model, go-to-market strategy, and stage of growth, supported by our Expert Community of more than 500 operators and practitioners, who collectively serve as an extension of your leadership team ready to engage on any host of strategic and operational topics that could change the trajectory of your growth curve, realize meaningful cost savings, help identify and convert the next critical leader, and everything in between. For Salonkee’s Tom Michels, an introduction to an operating advisor who renegotiated the company’s payment contracts saved the business “millions of euros annually.” ServiceUp’s Brett Carlson described the commitment simply: “they treat our business like their own.” At PeakSpan, no task is too small, and “how we can help” is more than lip service; it’s our operating mode and commitment.

During their partnerships with us, Cloudbeds grew revenue 35x and Cognism grew ARR 30x. We have delivered top-quartile or -decile performance across each of our fund vintages while maintaining a realized capital-loss rate below 3%. For the entrepreneurs who choose us, the partnership encompasses both the opportunity ahead and the confidence that someone understands how to help them pursue it. As Opkey CEO Pankaj Goel, who evaluated more than 60 investors before choosing us, explained: “We chose PeakSpan because of their domain knowledge, shared vision, and how they consistently demonstrated commitment to helping us succeed.”

To compile the Founder-Friendly Investors list, Inc. went straight to the source: entrepreneurs who have sold to private equity and venture capital firms. Founders completed questionnaires about their experiences partnering with private equity, venture capital, and debt firms and shared data on how their companies have performed during these partnerships. The resulting list highlights investors that founders identified as strong partners throughout the investment process.

Read Inc.’s full list and methodology here.