Sumit Rajpal and the people behind the algorithm

Before there was GrowthCurve Capital, there was a dinner in Washington. Goldman Sachs wanted Harit Talwar to consider a job building its consumer banking business. Talwar had declined to return repeated calls. Sumit Rajpal went to find him, and a brief dinner got the conversation moving. The future of a digital bank depended, for a moment, on an older technology: getting somebody to sit down with you.

It is a useful opening scene for Rajpal's career. He helped lead the early construction of Marcus, Goldman's digital consumer platform. Years later, he founded a private equity firm organized around artificial intelligence. Across those two projects runs a practical question: who will actually make the idea work? An algorithm can calculate. Persuading a capable person to join a venture remains an altogether different assignment.

Rajpal launched GrowthCurve in May 2021 with 20 investors and operating executives, plus ten advisors. The firm would buy control of businesses with valuable information and room to grow. Its design joined investment experience with expertise in AI, digital transformation and human capital. Those last two words can sound bloodless. The dinner with Talwar provides a livelier translation: businesses need people who will answer the call.

An investor learns to build

Rajpal's education began with commerce at the University of Bombay. He also earned a postgraduate Management Accountant Certification and a postgraduate qualification in business administration at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Accounting, management and investing would all have a place in his later work. The record offers a professional education in how companies function, before the larger question of how they might change.

He joined Goldman Sachs in 2000 and became a partner in 2010. His responsibilities included leading the Merchant Banking Division's global financial and information services investing business. He later became global co-head of the division and of its corporate equity investing businesses, and co-chief investment officer of flagship private equity funds, including West Street Capital Partners VII.

Those titles describe an investor entrusted with both individual transactions and a broader investing operation. Marcus supplied another kind of experience: helping build a business inside an established institution. The distinction matters to the story that followed. Choosing a company to own and creating the conditions for that company to grow call for overlapping skills, but they put different demands on the people involved.

At Marcus, recruitment was part of the construction work. Talwar's reluctance and Rajpal's dinner make a small, concrete episode out of a large corporate undertaking. There is no need to decorate it with a grand theory of leadership. A wanted executive was not engaging. Rajpal found a way to have the conversation. Sometimes the foundation of a technology business includes a table reservation.

A year spent tracing the connections

After leaving Goldman in early 2020, Rajpal served as a senior policy advisor to the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He co-authored a report on interconnectedness in US credit markets. It examined how credit moved through the financial system and how links between markets could carry stress from one part of the system into another.

The report traced roughly $54 trillion of outstanding credit at the end of 2019. Its closer examination of six markets covered more than $40 trillion. On October 14, 2020, Rajpal moderated the market-perspective panel at an SEC roundtable, with participants including Dawn Fitzpatrick, Barbara Novick and Thomas Wipf. His assignment placed him in a discussion about the machinery connecting institutions, borrowers and investors.

That interlude adds a different scale to his biography. A portfolio company asks its owners to understand its customers, its products and its employees. A market analysis asks how those businesses depend on a larger system. Viewed together, the assignments suggest an enduring subject in his work: the consequences of connecting things. At GrowthCurve, the connections would be built into the firm itself.

Who gets a seat before the deal?

GrowthCurve's founding design gave operating specialists a role early in investment decisions. Executives with expertise in digital transformation, AI, data analytics and human capital would sit on the investment committee and evaluate proposed deals. Their involvement began before an acquisition, when the firm was deciding what it could reasonably accomplish with a business.

For Rajpal, this was a response to a changing private equity market. He described an increasing emphasis on operational improvement and built a platform around “AI, digital transformation, and human capital.” The phrase put three kinds of work beside one another. Technical capability would need a workable product and an organization able to deliver it. Buying the business was the beginning of that assignment.

The launch team included Michael Finke as chief AI architect, Sajjad Jaffer leading data analytics and machine learning, and Mark Uhrmacher leading digital transformation. Matthew Popper brought investing experience from Goldman. The advisory group included former LexisNexis chief Andrew Prozes, BlackRock co-founder Barbara Novick and Harvard professor Mihir Desai. Rajpal assembled people whose experience addressed different parts of the same business problem.

In September 2022, Angela Geffre joined as head of human capital and an investment committee member. Rajpal described her appointment in terms of helping portfolio companies build the capabilities required as they grew. Her remit included organizational design, talent acquisition, performance management and leadership development. These are the less photogenic parts of expansion. A company can announce a new product in an afternoon; building the team to support it takes longer.

The billion-dollar milestone, in human terms

On June 13, 2023, GrowthCurve announced the final close of its inaugural fund, with $1.4 billion in commitments for the fund and related co-investment vehicles. Its backers included pension funds, insurers, family offices and other strategic partners. The amount was a milestone for a firm that had publicly launched two years earlier.

Rajpal's own account of the occasion spent considerable attention on the people involved. He thanked employees, investors, company partners, management teams and advisors. On LinkedIn, he described the journey as one centered on people. The double exclamation marks give the otherwise institutional announcement a touch of personal handwriting. Here was the founder of an AI-centered investment firm celebrating trust, collaboration and the builders inside its companies.

The commitments gave GrowthCurve capital to pursue its strategy; they did not, by themselves, establish the results of that strategy. The useful biographical fact is the transition they mark. Rajpal had moved from managing investments inside Goldman to building an independent institution that other investors were prepared to fund. He now had to make his own organization deliver on the proposition that brought them there.

A hotel room, a fee calculation, a construction bid

The proposition becomes easier to understand through the businesses GrowthCurve chose. In June 2024, it acquired Duetto, a hospitality revenue management software company. At the announcement, Duetto's applications served more than 6,000 hotel and casino resort properties in more than 60 countries. Its software supported pricing, reporting and contracted business, with a new offering for meeting and event spaces.

A room price is an everyday decision with a substantial information problem underneath it. Duetto connects systems and data to support those decisions. GrowthCurve described plans to accelerate its AI strategy, develop products and enter new markets. For Rajpal's firm, the attraction was a business already handling decisions for customers, with information that could support further product development. The room comes with a view; the business comes with a dataset.

In August 2024, GrowthCurve made a majority investment in PureFacts, the Toronto-based revenue management software business founded by Robert Madej in 1997. Madej and employees retained their interests. Its platform helps investment firms calculate, collect, distribute and optimize revenue through fees, incentive compensation and business intelligence. Rajpal described the planned work in terms of people, technology and additional capabilities for clients.

This is a quieter corner of finance than a trading floor, but one full of consequential calculations. Billing and compensation have to work inside an increasingly complex operating environment. The PureFacts investment gave GrowthCurve another setting in which its proposed combination of technical and organizational work could be applied to a defined customer problem.

PlanHub followed in September 2025. The commercial construction software platform connected subcontractors, general contractors and suppliers, with more than 500,000 construction professionals in its nationwide network at the announcement. GrowthCurve said its plans included AI features inside the platform, new business lines and expansion into new markets.

Taken together, these investments show the range of Rajpal's thesis without requiring the businesses to resemble one another. Hospitality pricing, investment-industry revenue management and construction bidding each involve information embedded in working relationships. Their customers have decisions to make, and the software sits close to those decisions. The opportunity depends on improving something people already need to do.

“This journey has been all about the people!!”Sumit Rajpal on the inaugural fund close, LinkedIn, 2023

The organization is part of the product

Rajpal has also written about how financial institutions might be designed differently. In March 2023, he and Mihir Desai co-authored an argument for payment banks following Silicon Valley Bank's failure. Their proposal addressed businesses holding deposits above the insured limit: give those funds a tightly regulated home with little or no credit or maturity risk and access to payments.

It was a proposal about architecture, responsibilities and the particular job an institution should perform. That gives it a family resemblance to the question behind GrowthCurve. If a company needs better decisions, what combination of software, information, people and authority will help it make them? The answer has to take a form that somebody can operate.

GrowthCurve's current approach emphasizes proprietary data, networks and competitive protections such as customer trust and regulatory requirements. Its stated work with management includes product development, engineering, talent processes and sales. The scope helps explain Rajpal's repeated attention to human capital: a technical roadmap reaches into hiring, incentives, reporting lines and the way work gets done.

His public ambition at launch was to build an enduring business. The career behind that ambition contains investing, consumer-business construction, market analysis and an independent firm's formation. The most revealing detail may still be the least numerical one. Before a digital platform could take shape, there was a person to recruit. Rajpal went to dinner. Years later, his investment firm gave the people who understand execution seats at the table.