As soon as Copilot Capital founder John Messer decided to start a B2B software fund, Dave Sun, his old friend from London Business School, was top of his list to build Copilot with.

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Dave is a B2B software investor through and through, having spent seven years at Hg following his MBA, before a role “on the inside” at TravelPerk, the corporate travel scale-up. It was at this point that John came knocking and, thankfully, Dave was keen.

“I didn't need much convincing,” he says. “We’ve been friends for a long time, and that trust factor made joining Copilot a no-brainer.”

Copilot’s thesis fit perfectly with Dave’s career trajectory, and his desire to focus purely on founder-backed businesses.

“The exciting thing for Copilot is that the B2B software industry is still growing,” he says. “There's a huge amount of adoption yet to happen, much of it driven by young, hungry founders building SaaS native products, and taking lessons from the success stories of the last five to 10 years.”

Tracking the B2B growth curve

Having seen the evolution of B2B software over the previous ten years, Dave fully appreciated the size of the opportunity.

“In 2015, we thought we were in the middle of the adoption curve, but looking back, it was clear we were still only in the foothills,” he says. “One of the big reasons Hg scaled so fast is that it decided earlier than almost everyone in Europe that B2B software was one of its big bets.”

His Hg experience taught him the importance of specialisation in investing; another reason why he was attracted to Copilot, and how we add value as a team.

“There's a real craft to investing that is hard if you don't specialise, and you get more of an edge if you focus,” he says. “When we talk to founders and management teams, they feel that difference in the level of insights and conversation we bring to the table.”

Time “on the inside”

After Hg, Dave made the switch from investor to operator, taking a role as Director of Strategic Finance at TravelPerk. Keen to get the whole picture of what happens in a rapidly scaling B2B software business, he acted as a bridge to different business functions, including the go-to-market and revenue teams, helping identify and track the right metrics. This experience gave him insight into the demands of software leadership.

“The CFO and CRO at TravelPerk were both incredible, and it helped me develop mental models for what great operators look like,” he says. “I would advise any investor to spend some time gaining that internal perspective of how a fast-growth software business operates.”

The Copilot opportunity

Now, at Copilot, Dave is seeing a new generation of B2B software businesses come through, which benefit from the huge technology advancements of the last ten years, along with the depth of knowledge on how to scale a software business successfully.

“Businesses now only need to focus on building a great user experience and solving a big problem, rather than the infrastructure, which means they can move faster and build better products,” he explains. “They also have more playbooks on go-to-market and software sales, plus the talent pools are deeper. The right ingredients are there for scaling faster than ever.”

Added to this, founders now have AI, which Dave believes will have the same impact in the next ten years as cloud hosting did in the last ten.

“In the way that cloud hosting unlocked the ability to build a software business for much less capital, AI is going to do the same again,” he says. “It doesn't mean less B2B software will be built, it means even more will be built.”

Enjoying the “startup vibes”

Spending half his time supporting portfolio companies and half seeking out new deals, Dave has hit the ground running as part of Copilot’s entrepreneurial culture.

“We’ve already established ourselves on the private equity landscape, but as an organisation, we still have startup vibes,” he says. “We're such a small and tight team, and it's exciting to feel like we’re building something together.”

He has particularly enjoyed the satisfaction of winning the first three deals, most notably the challenge of investing in a Danish delisting with Relesys and securing the PriceShape deal through his network.

“Transactionally, Relesys was a complex deal, and it was thrilling to get that first investment done,” he says. “And PriceShape was a fantastic example of the power of the network because I knew one of the investors, and he flagged it to us ahead of the competition.”

For now, Dave is knuckling down to win more deals and ensure the existing portfolio is best positioned for growth.

“There are still lots of exciting businesses out there that we're chasing down,” he concludes. “And on the portfolio side, the first two years are critical, because everything we do now will only come to fruition in three or four years. We're setting the foundation for the rest of the journey.”

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