Perspectives

PeakSpan Infrastructure Software Landscape

and

Sanket Merchant

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Yaseen Abdulridha

December 1, 2022

Drumroll, please…

We’ve long awaited this moment and are excited to share our inaugural market map of the Infrastructure Software landscape! The world of Infrastructure Software is incredibly broad and encompasses multiple discrete disciplines which rightfully deserve their own landscape publications and sub-category segmentation. And, yes, these are already in motion — we got you!

Our goal with this landscape is to:

Provide a ring fence around how we at PeakSpan define “Infrastructure Software” across these core disciplines
Share a lens into the various nodes or product categories that span the “lifecycle” of infrastructure software

Our Infrastructure Software Landscape is one of the first to span the entirety of infrastructure operations (endpoints, applications, data infrastructure, and across functional disciplines such as development and IT). Our enthusiasm for the innovation and opportunity we see broadly across IT, data infrastructure management, automation, cloud infrastructure, DevOps/dev tools, and more is rooted in one simple principle. We believe that virtually every company and category in this landscape is mission-critical and is only scratching the surface of the market opportunities ahead.

Amidst an uneasy economic backdrop, we see a plethora of tailwinds driving incredible product opportunities across each of the disciplines outlined above, including (i) virtually every company becoming a software company, (ii) supply-demand imbalances for talent, (iii) accelerating digitization of vertical markets propelled by the global pandemic, (iv) the ebbs and flows of generalization versus specialization, and the existential need to drive enhanced efficiency and automation. Our outlook and enthusiasm for the quality and velocity of innovation in Infrastructure Software remains incredibly bullish and we’ll continue sharing our thoughts and theses we’ve built and continue to refine over the coming weeks, months and years!

If interested, please see here for a piece we published earlier outlining our perspectives on the themes we believe will endure in the years ahead.

We welcome any and all feedback — let us know what you think!

A special thanks to our exceptional infrastructure software advisor and expert community members for their invaluable input and feedback in helping us memorialize this research over the past few months. We greatly appreciate your partnership!

About Sanket Merchant

Sanket has worked with growth-stage software businesses throughout his career and has served on more than 12 boards. Today, he is one of four Partners on the team and leads the firm's coverage of both Cyber & Digital Infrastructure and EdTech. Sanket joined PeakSpan just one year after its founding in 2016 as one of the first non-founding team members and has helped build the firm from two investments and $150M in Fund I to more than $2.5B in AUM, backing applied AI and B2B software companies on the journey from $3–10M to beyond $50M in ARR.

Before joining PeakSpan, Sanket worked in the Technology, Media & Telecom Group at Houlihan Lokey, focusing exclusively on software M&A and private financing transactions for $10–50M ARR companies through critical inflection points such as selling, raising capital, or recapitalizing. Before Houlihan Lokey, Sanket was a Global Banking and Brokerage Group Consultant at FactSet Research Systems, where he partnered with investment banking, private equity, and venture capital clients.

Sanket holds a B.B.A. in Finance with a minor in Economics from the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Sanket jokes that he's grown up at PeakSpan, having celebrated some remarkable personal milestones while with the firm, including getting engaged and married to his wife, Mansi, purchasing their first home, and welcoming their twin boys, Aarav and Samar.

About Yaseen Abdulridha

Yaseen joined PeakSpan Capital in 2021 and, over the past decade, has spent his career working on and alongside software companies at pivotal moments in their respective journeys. Before PeakSpan, he was an investment banking Associate at J.P. Morgan, advising software companies on M&A and capital raises. Earlier in his career, he worked as a quantitative analyst building statistical and machine learning models focused on portfolio risk modeling.

Yaseen holds both an M.S. and a B.S. in Quantitative Economics from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and is a CFA Charterholder. A builder at heart, he is obsessed with the mission of being the partner of choice for growth-stage entrepreneurs and has the privilege of joining exceptional teams as they scale go-to-market, evolve product strategy, and build enduring companies. He lives in California with his wife and pinches himself every day that he gets to be part of such an amazing team and boards.

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