Mainsail Partners

Co-founders Gavin Turner and Jason Payne serve as managing partners and lead the investment committee. Both were previously at Summit Partners, where they focused on growth-stage technology investments. The firm operates a relatively flat partnership structure, with investment decisions made collectively by the senior partners.

Mainsail sources almost exclusively from non-auction situations, targeting founder-owned, bootstrapped B2B software companies that have never taken institutional capital. The firm's operations team participates in sourcing by attending industry conferences, hosting executive roundtables, and publishing data-driven content that attracts founder CEOs. This outbound, relationship-led model reduces competition from auction processes.

Mainsail does both minority growth investments and majority recapitalizations. In minority situations, the firm typically takes board seats and embeds its operations team inside the company to drive specific growth initiatives. In majority deals, Mainsail often partners with founding CEOs who continue to lead the business post-close, using the firm's operating resources to build out a professional management layer beneath them.

Mainsail targets bootstrapped B2B software companies with $5 million to $30 million in annual recurring revenue. The firm has occasionally invested in tech-enabled services businesses within the same revenue band. Check sizes range from approximately $10 million to over $100 million, depending on deal structure and growth capital needs.

Mainsail employs over 40 full-time operating professionals across functions including sales, marketing, engineering, finance, and data science. These operators embed inside portfolio companies for multi-month engagements following close — not as advisors or fractional executives, but as execution-oriented team members. They work on pricing strategy, churn reduction, sales-process redesign, and management hiring until the company can support those functions independently.

While Mainsail's primary geographic focus is the United States and Canada, the firm has made investments in English-speaking markets abroad — notably Australia and the United Kingdom — where the bootstrapped B2B software profile it targets is increasingly common. The firm's offices in San Francisco and Austin serve as hubs for North American deal activity.

Mainsail explicitly avoids consumer technology, hardware, biotech, and capital-intensive industrial businesses. The firm does not invest in pre-revenue companies or heavily venture-funded startups. Its model is built for capital-efficient, recurring-revenue B2B software companies with demonstrated product-market fit and profitable unit economics.