Alba’s passion for software growth investing and building founder relationships made Copilot a unique and exciting career move.

“The important themes of my career have been deep sector knowledge, growth and a human focus,” she says. “I love working closely with founders. I have a deep admiration for their journey as builders and really enjoy helping them accelerate growth to transform how industries operate.”

The power of specialisation

Copilot Capital differentiates itself on its pure software scale-up focus, and specialisation has been central to Alba’s career since the beginning. Growing up in New York, she did a stint in investment banking followed by her first investing role at Advent International, an early mover in sector specialisation in private equity. Alba focused on consumer and energy sectors and quickly saw the value of this approach.

“What I loved seeing is how much value the investors brought as they built domain expertise in sectors,” she explains. “Knowing the market in detail, they spoke the same language as founders from the first meeting, built trust quickly and were able to show a track record of supporting teams drive grow in that sector. They also developed quick conviction when underwriting investments, allowing them to move fast with high deliverability to get deals done.”

Discovering software investing

Alba then made the move to London to continue her investing career. Her first exposure to software investing was working to launch PSG in Europe, a growth stage software fund, sparking an interest that would define her future career.

“I fell in love with software, the underlying trends driving growth and the power it has to transform every industry, while empowering employees,” she says. “There is no sector that moves as quickly as technology does today, with the same impact.”

While building her software investing career at the London offices of PSG and Accel-KKR, Alba focused on helping founders scale from $5-20m ARR to $50m+ and become market leaders. Working closely with talented teams that had developed leading products in niche attractive markets, growth was always at the heart of her focus.

“I worked with founders that had built strong foundations from which to accelerate growth,” she says. “With ambitious goals we invested across sales, product and M&A, making key growth bets without losing focus on capital efficiency. This balance of growth and sustainability was at the core as we supported founders to scale.”

Joining Copilot

When John Messer founded Copilot Capital, Alba’s breadth of experience made her a great addition for the new team. For Alba, the role combined all her core passions with a fantastic entrepreneurial opportunity.

“I went from big PE firms to a first-time fund,” she says. “To be part of a founding team and write our own story in an investing industry that is quite mature today is very unique. Working with a high-quality team to build a strong culture, best-in-class processes and a fresh approach to partnering with founders, and then take flight, was a one of the most rewarding experiences in my career.”

Alba’s longstanding relationships with John Messer and Dave Sun also gave her confidence that it was the right move: “I had known John personally for 7+ years and Dave for 5+ years. So, there was a sense of trust between us from the start.”

Working with founders

Working with founders at scale-up stage, Alba enjoys building strong relationships as they navigate unique challenges and opportunities.

“Founders often lack peers and mentors,” she says “My goal is to build trust quickly and put the right elements in place around founding teams to help them shine. That means being authentic, empathetic and working hard to help at every stage of the investment process.”

Building trust also ensures that when tough decisions need to be made, founders can be open and have confidence the Copilot team understands their unique challenges and will do what is needed to support them in hard times.

She sees Copilot contributing to three key areas: strategy, people and acceleration.

“Strategy is all about focus; what are the three bets – from Copilot’s five core strategies - that can transform the business in next three to five years? People is: how can we get the right motivated people on the bus? And acceleration is: how do we execute on these bets and incrementally invest in the biggest opportunities, with speed and conviction?”

Right place, right time

Having moved to the UK from the US, Alba can see the unique opportunity for Copilot in the European market.

“There are fewer sector-focused investors here and software penetration across geographies is lower, driving sector growth,” she says. “Plus, there's an amazing European tech talent pool to draw on.”

With more than 10 years of investing behind her, Alba has also seen the sector become increasingly competitive and believes Copilot is in the ideal position to take advantage of market shifts in the coming years.

“There are many larger funds that have scaled quickly, and it’s much harder to achieve the returns of ten years ago,” she says. “Copilot’s focus on smaller businesses can drive outsized performance for our investors and founders that invest alongside us. High quality scaled software companies are rare. If we can help founders get to that level, we will have a portfolio of very coveted businesses – and a very bright future as a firm.”

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