A team jersey is a surprisingly complicated thing to sell. There are sizes, names, deadlines, inventories, and parents who need somewhere to place an order. The Burghardt family knew this work from its sporting goods business in Wisconsin. Chipply grew from that knowledge: software made by people already tangled in the problem.
By November 2023, Chipply had attracted Growth Street Partners, which made a minority investment and joined its board. Three years later, co-founder Lynn Burghardt explained the decision in unusually useful terms. The attraction was experienced help: finding senior leaders, arranging the business for growth, and relieving a founding team stretched thin.
- Growth Street backs specialized business software with paying customers.
- Its minority investments pair capital with hiring and operating help.
- Founders keep control, while sharing ownership and future proceeds.
A jersey order is an investment thesis
That little transaction explains the firm. Growth Street looks for founders who understand an industry from the inside. The buyer’s daily annoyance has already become the founder’s working knowledge. In Chipply’s case, a family business supplied both the problem and a place to understand it.
There is a market position here. Growth Street specializes in vertical B2B SaaS and technology-enabled services, focusing on underserved markets across the United States and Canada. Its prospective partners have built something customers buy. Now they need an organization capable of selling and supporting more of it.
Steve Wolfe and Nate Grossman started the firm after working together at Mainsail Partners. Contemporary coverage dates its founding to late 2016. Their first fund followed in 2017, with $70 million and an investment in Pear Deck, a classroom software business founded by former educators in Iowa City.
The price of keeping the wheel
In a September 2026 interview, Wolfe described checks of $5 million to $15 million. The firm’s website targets businesses with roughly $1 million to $5 million or more in annual run-rate recurring revenue. This is the awkward interval when customer demand can outrun the founder’s management capacity.
The exchange is equity. Wolfe and Grossman have described ownership targets of 20% to 50%, while emphasizing a minority strategy and continued founder control. Those numbers describe their approach, rather than a universal offer. Governance rights still require negotiation; a percentage alone cannot explain who gets to decide what.
“But the decision was really about advice and expertise.”Lynn Burghardt, Chipply / September 2026
Growth Street offers help recruiting executives, organizing sales and marketing, improving systems, and pursuing acquisitions. For Chipply, the need was concrete: senior sales and engineering leadership, plus a structure that did not leave every important question with the original team. Burghardt described regular engagement alongside continued autonomy.
The distinction matters when choosing among financing options. A founder comparing minority growth equity with venture funding, a majority sale, or continued bootstrapping is choosing a working arrangement as well as a balance sheet. Growth Street manages investment funds; its portfolio companies sell the actual software subscriptions and services.
The app that customers did not want
Consider another portfolio founder, Shawn Boyer of goHappy. His company began with a mobile app. Customers kept requesting something simpler: the ability to text their frontline employees. During COVID, he moved the product toward SMS. In his October 2026 account, texting overtook the app within seven months.
The sequence is revealing. Growth Street’s investment came in December 2022, after that product change. It backed a company that had listened to its users. The earlier approach had created friction: reaching workers depended on getting them into another application. Customers’ requests supplied the reason to change direction.
Boyer’s broader warning is about speed. His experience across different financing models taught him that aggressive projections can become expensive commitments. Hiring ahead of proven assumptions consumes cash and creates painful churn when plans fail. Growth capital makes an organization capable of moving faster; it does not establish that faster is wise.
One company, several finish lines
The firm’s own capital base has grown. It announced a $130 million second fund in January 2021 and a $200 million third fund in January 2026. At that third announcement, Growth Street reported more than $400 million under management, 17 investments, and 11 liquidity events from nine investments.
Eleven events from nine investments sounds odd until you consider that an investor can receive liquidity at more than one stage. Visual Lease brought in Spectrum Equity in 2019, following Growth Street’s earlier investment. In October 2024, CoStar announced an agreement to acquire the lease administration and accounting company.
Other transactions show the range of possible next chapters. Suralink announced a strategic growth investment from Luminate Capital in 2022. CENTEGIX announced its acquisition of school-safety software company Pikmykid in April 2026. These outcomes illustrate paths through the portfolio; they do not establish what another founder should expect to earn.
Give the money a job
The useful lesson for a founder is wonderfully specific: identify the operating problem before choosing the capital. Chipply needed leadership capacity. goHappy needed to follow customer behavior before pressing the accelerator. A precise diagnosis makes it easier to judge whether an investor’s proposed help is useful.
This arrangement requires a company with recurring demand, room to grow, and a founder willing to share equity and accept advice. A pre-revenue idea sits outside the stated target. So does a founder who wants capital without another owner. Minority investment preserves meaningful autonomy while creating a continuing obligation to work together.
In that same September interview, Wolfe emphasized shared values because founders make thousands of decisions without their investor present. That is the practical wager beneath Growth Street’s model. You can help shape the next stage of a business. You still need to trust the person who knows why the jersey order went wrong.