# Sanket Merchant **Partner** ## In their words: **Scale-up company building is hard by definition—but that’s precisely what makes it meaningful.** ## Sector Expertise - Cybersecurity & Digital Infrastructure - Education Technology ## Investments - [Abre](/content/partnership/abre/index.html) - [Bongo](/content/partnership/bongo/index.html) - [Cyara](/content/partnership/cyara/index.html) - [Epignosis](/content/partnership/epignosis/index.html) - [Fuel50](/content/partnership/fuel50/index.html) - [Inference](/content/partnership/inference/index.html) - [Kenna Security](/content/partnership/kenna-security/index.html) - [Kudoboard](/content/partnership/kudoboard/index.html) - [MindBridge](/content/partnership/mindbridge/index.html) - [Opkey](/content/partnership/opkey/index.html) - [SOCRadar](/content/partnership/socradar/index.html) - [Yodeck](/content/partnership/yodeck/index.html) ## About: 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. ## What makes you excited to come to work each day at this stage of your career? Undoubtedly, it’s the people and the impact. I’ve long subscribed to Theodore Roosevelt’s belief that “nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, and difficulty.” Scale-up company building is hard by definition, but that is precisely what makes it meaningful. What pulls me in each day is the knowledge that our collective effort can help unlock outcomes that matter. When a company succeeds, it is not just a financial milestone; it is the realization of a mission that affects hundreds or thousands of customers and fundamentally alters the trajectory and quality of life for the teams who made it possible. Being in the middle of that work, helping navigate ambiguity, pressure, and inflection points, requires constant growth and exceptional problem solving, which I deeply value. The stakes are real, and that is what makes the work energizing. ## What’s a project or moment at PeakSpan where your involvement changed a company’s trajectory? One seminal example is the launch of PeakSpan’s Master Classes, an inside-out initiative that has ultimately benefited thousands of scale-ups over the past decade. We created the Master Classes as a one-to-many educational series designed to bring some of the most accomplished operators in software to the table, sharing real playbooks and hard-earned lessons from the front lines. The goal was simple but ambitious: to give founders and executive teams access to the kind of insight they would normally only gain through years of trial, error, and lived experience. At PeakSpan, our mission is to help scale-ups scale with clarity and summit with confidence. The Master Classes became a powerful way to do exactly that, helping founders navigate the challenges they face daily as if they had some of the best operators in the world, with hundreds of collective years of experience, guiding them on what to do and, just as importantly, what not to do. The impact has been meaningful and durable, providing practical clarity, sharper decision making, and a sense of confidence at moments that often define outcomes. ## What personal experience most shaped how you work with founders today? Growing up, I helped run my family's motels from age 10. Managing the front desk, handling housekeeping, all before and after school and on weekends. Our motel was our home and our workplace. My parents had immigrated from Mumbai without the same academic opportunities I would later have, and they worked tirelessly to build something from nothing. I watched and lived that every single day. Those years did two things. They gave me grit and a relentless focus that became my operating system. And they showed me what entrepreneurship can actually be -- not just a business model, but a real vehicle for mobility and impact, a way of creating something meaningful for your family and community. That is the lens I bring when I sit across from a founder. I am not just looking at a business. I am thinking about what it felt like to be in a high-stakes situation where the margin for error was small and the support system was thin. When what you are building is tied to your identity and your family's security, the pressure lands differently. The loneliness is real. So is the weight of every decision. That is why I take seriously what I think is the greatest privilege of this role -- being a genuine partner. Not just in the boardroom, but in the moments between board meetings, the ones that never make it into a deck. My parents never had the luxury of being passive, and neither did I at 10. I carry that into every founder relationship. Whatever the moment calls for, that is where I want to be. ## Personal side: - **Wife & Kids** - **Food & Travel** - **Tennis** - **Skiing** - **Colorado Sports** - **Running** - **Cooking**