Richard Potter and the art of the useful decision

The first piece of Peak’s product design had an unusually absorbent user interface. It was a napkin. Richard Potter and his future co-founders, David Leitch and Atul Sharma, were in a Manchester pub, sketching an idea for software that could bring a business’s scattered data together. By January 2022, Potter said the original doodle was hanging at headquarters. Most office art asks very little of its audience. This one had become a company.

There is a reason that small detail suits Potter. His career keeps returning to the distance between an interesting idea and something another person can use. A chip needs a product. A forecast needs a decision. A software platform needs a customer who can explain what has improved since buying it. Peak, jointly founded in Manchester and Jaipur in 2015, gave that preoccupation a commercial home.

Ten years later, UiPath acquired the business. Potter had helped build an AI company well before the current enthusiasm for talking to computers. His particular interest was what happened after the talking: the price on a quotation, the stock in a warehouse, the decision somebody had to make before the working day was over.

The computer that came home from college

Potter’s introduction to programming arrived through his mother, who taught at a local college. She brought home a discarded BBC microcomputer and a substantial book about coding. Before they were ten, Potter and his brother were teaching themselves to write games and quizzes. The machine had been retired by an institution and immediately promoted by two children.

Business ownership was familiar territory in the family. Three generations on his father’s side had run butchers’ businesses. His father went into car factories and taught himself binary coding to move beyond the factory floor. Potter grew up seeing several ways to earn a living, including making a business of your own. He has been explicit about the advantage that gave him: people around him made entrepreneurship seem possible.

That background helps explain his interest in access. For a child with a computer and a book, learning could begin at home. For an established company with data but little specialist expertise, the equivalent starting point was harder to find. Years later, the practical question would be how to make sophisticated software available to people whose jobs did not involve building it.

Chips, stocks and the customer’s problem

His working life crossed several versions of the technology business. At Wolfson Microelectronics, he ran a product line supplying chips to companies including Apple, Samsung, Amazon and Sony. At UBS, he covered technology and semiconductor stocks through the 2008 financial crash. He also became commercial director at Cooper Software, working in a business concerned with systems integration, enterprise software and business intelligence.

These were useful vantage points for a future founder. Semiconductors put technology inside products people buy. Equity research asks what a business is worth. Systems integration confronts the untidy circumstances in which software actually has to work. Potter’s eventual company would sit close to all three concerns: technical capability, commercial value and the effort of getting a customer from one to the other.

Peak initially operated as a consultancy. Its first data consulting project helped convince Potter that the business needed another model. He wanted projects to become more accessible and deliver benefits sooner. Peak moved towards a subscription business, giving customers a continuing way to use analytics and AI. It was a consequential change of direction for somebody whose own experience already spanned both technology and selling it.

“Move faster!”

Richard Potter’s advice to his younger self, 2019

A better decision needs somewhere to go

Potter’s explanation of decision intelligence starts with the result a company wants. That could be a higher margin or a better rate of sale. The intended outcome shapes the work, rather than arriving at the end as a hopeful addition. It is a disciplined way of asking an expensive technology to account for itself.

In his description, Peak brings together data from across an organisation, provides tools for building models and gives business users a way to interact with the outputs. The last part matters. A prediction kept inside a technical team has a limited working life. Somebody in merchandising, sales or supply planning needs to be able to use it while making the next call.

Consider the ordinary choices involved in inventory. Buying more stock commits cash. Buying too little risks missing demand. A change in price can affect both the margin and how quickly goods move. These are linked choices, with consequences for people in different departments. Potter’s proposition was that AI should help a business work through those connections with a commercial objective already in view.

There was a sales problem alongside the technical one. In his account of Peak’s early years, Potter describes spending considerable time explaining AI to prospective customers. Later, the task changed: businesses were more aware of the technology, yet still needed help deciding how to implement it. Recognition could open a conversation. A useful application still had to earn the purchase.

The large cheque and the small print of growth

On 31 August 2021, Peak announced a $75 million Series C led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Existing investors participated, including MMC Ventures, Oxx, Praetura Ventures, Arete and Octopus Ventures. Peak put its total funding at $119 million at that point. It also said revenue had more than doubled over the preceding twelve months, with customer wins across several regions.

The money gave the company resources for research, development and expansion. It also put an older founder’s question under a brighter light: how much of the future should you promise when pitching the next stage? Potter later reflected that Peak had been modest with investors, concentrating on the next thing it was building rather than the whole ambition. He thought a bolder account might have helped sooner.

He has also described the patience involved. Building a team and developing talent took time; so did creating a broad platform. The wish to move faster sits beside a preference for a considered approach. That is a recognisable founder’s tension. Capital can arrive on a particular date. Experience, trust and a product that works have rather less respect for the calendar.

A Manchester company with two starting points

Potter has given a refreshingly straightforward explanation for choosing Manchester: the founders lived there. He has spoken about the city’s connections and talent, while acknowledging that specialist skills and capital could be harder to find. It is an account of location with actual trade-offs, rather than a brochure’s collection of adjectives.

Jaipur belongs in the story too. When announcing the UiPath deal, the three founders made a point of celebrating both cities. They saw the company as evidence that enterprise software could be built outside the familiar centres of the industry. Peak’s international character was present in its origins, rather than something acquired once the business became large enough to book more flights.

Closer to home, Potter described supporting FareShare Greater Manchester through fundraising and a plan to apply decision intelligence to volunteer resources. In a 2022 leadership interview, he discussed a forthcoming hackathon involving the UK data science team. The appeal was practical and local: use the expertise already inside the company to help another organisation work more efficiently.

His account of culture is similarly concerned with daily behaviour. He wants people to have responsibility and room to contribute. Peak’s stated values include curiosity, openness and being driven. Those are company values, rather than a personality test for its chief executive. Still, his repeated concern with opportunity, useful work and how people experience the business gives the ambition a human scale.

From the recommendation to the action

The acquisition announced on 12 March 2025 brought Peak into UiPath’s automation business. There was already a working relationship. Together, the companies had helped Heidelberg Materials with quotation pricing, using automation to collect data and AI to propose an appropriate quote for sales professionals. UiPath reported faster quotation times and improved conversion rates.

For Potter and his co-founders, the combination offered a larger distribution network and a way to connect decision intelligence with execution. Their announcement promised continuity of the core technology, team and vision. The next chapter would involve helping customers act on recommendations as well as generate them. UiPath now identifies Potter as GM and VP of Peak, a UiPath company.

In September 2025, Potter set out that framework in writing. He argued that leaders should assess AI by asking whether it improves decisions, the use of resources or the rate of activity. The equation is his management lens. Its attraction is the question it makes a buyer ask before approving another project: which part of the business will perform better?

Later that month, Peak introduced agentic solutions for commercial pricing, inventory management and merchandising. Potter described the frustration of systems that produce more alerts and recommendations for teams already busy making decisions. The new products were intended to carry more of the work through to action. He named Hain Celestial and Speedy Hire among businesses already using the solutions.

By November, Peak was describing a Debenhams Group deployment that connected stock, pricing and promotions information ahead of holiday demand. The work followed a partnership that began in June. For Potter, it was another instance of a longstanding aim: put AI alongside a business team, inside the choices that affect its working day.

The napkin survives as a satisfying origin story. The more revealing continuity is the question behind it. Across chips, finance, software and now automation, Potter keeps returning to what technology enables somebody to do next. A useful decision has a destination. His business has been built around getting it there.