software-discovery
(2)
Godard Abel
Godard Abel is the co-founder and CEO of G2, the software review platform that brought Yelp-style peer reviews to enterprise software buying. A third-generation entrepreneur born in Germany and raised in Pittsburgh, he built and sold two SaaS companies before G2: BigMachines (acquired by Oracle for a reported $400M+) and SteelBrick (acquired by Salesforce). At G2 he has raised more than $260M, weathered a near-bankruptcy earlier in his career, and is now steering the company through the AI wave with its buying agent Monty and the 2026 acquisition of Gartner's Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice.
G2
G2 is the world's largest software marketplace and peer-review platform, where business buyers research, compare, and choose B2B software based on millions of verified user reviews. Founded in 2012 by a team of BigMachines alumni led by Godard Abel, G2 turned the messy, vendor-dominated software buying process into something closer to checking restaurant reviews before dinner. Today the platform hosts millions of reviews across thousands of categories, sells buyer-intent data and marketing services to software vendors, and after its 2026 acquisition of Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp reaches more than 200 million annual software buyers.