Brighton Park Capital: The $4B Growth Equity Firm Most Investors Have Never Heard Of
TL;DR Brighton Park Capital manages approximately $4 billion in assets. In roughly 18 months, the firm generated two disclosed exits above $400 million each: Paradox sold to Workday for $1 billion in
TL;DR
Brighton Park Capital manages approximately $4 billion in assets. In roughly 18 months, the firm generated two disclosed exits above $400 million each: Paradox sold to Workday for $1 billion in August 2025, and NuORDER sold to Lightspeed for $425 million in 2021. The firm has been named to GrowthCap's top private equity list two years running and BluWave's Top PE Innovator four consecutive years. Most accredited investors have never heard of them. That is the whole story, and also the point.
What Brighton Park Does
Brighton Park Capital is a growth equity firm. That means they write checks into software and technology companies that are already generating revenue, help those companies scale, and exit when the time is right via acquisition or public offering. They do not do seed rounds. They do not do buyouts. They pick a lane and stay in it.
The firm was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut. They have offices in New York, San Francisco, and London (the London office opened in July 2025). Their check size runs from $50 million to $250 million. They hold roughly 32 active portfolio companies at any given time, a number that is intentionally small. Their sectors of focus are enterprise software, cybersecurity, healthcare IT, and data analytics. Fifty-three percent of their portfolio companies have established global operations.
If you want a one-line description: they buy meaningful stakes in profitable or near-profitable software businesses and add operational firepower that most growth equity firms cannot match. Their tagline on the website is "growth equity reimagined." I will let the exits speak to whether that claim holds up.
The Founders
Mark Dzialga spent 20 years at General Atlantic. He joined in 1998. He chaired the investment committee from 2007 to 2017. Before GA, he co-headed the High Technology M&A group at Goldman Sachs. He left General Atlantic in 2018 and founded Brighton Park Capital in 2019. When you spend two decades chairing the investment committee at one of the most successful growth equity firms on earth and then build your own shop from scratch, people pay attention. Fund I was $1.1 billion. That is not a small first fund.
Mike Gregoire is co-founder and partner. His resume is the other half of what makes this firm unusual. Gregoire was Chairman and CEO of CA Technologies from 2013 to 2018. He oversaw the company's sale to Broadcom in 2018, a deal that generated approximately $10.5 billion in market cap appreciation during his tenure. Before CA Technologies, he was Chairman and CEO of Taleo, which he sold to Oracle in 2012. He also served as EVP at PeopleSoft from 1999 to 2004. As of today, he chairs the boards of both Smartsheet (NYSE: SMAR) and AMD.
You do not often find a Fortune 500 CEO with two successful acquisitions behind him sitting as a partner at a growth equity fund, actively involved in portfolio company operations. That is Brighton Park's structural edge. Gregoire sat on the board of Paradox, the HR AI company that Workday bought for $1 billion. He is not an advisory board figurehead. He is in the room.
Fund History
| Fund | Year Closed | Size |
|---|---|---|
| Brighton Park Capital Fund I, L.P. | 2020 | $1.1 billion |
| Brighton Park Capital Fund II, L.P. | 2022 | $1.8 billion |
Fund I closed in November 2020. Fund II closed in November 2022 at $1.8 billion, exceeding its $1.5 billion target. The Fund II close matters for one specific reason: November 2022 was the depth of the software market selloff. While public SaaS multiples were collapsing and other growth equity managers were struggling to hold their existing book, Brighton Park raised $300 million above target. Endowments, foundations, family offices, pension funds, and financial institutions from North America and globally committed capital. That is a meaningful vote of confidence from institutional allocators who had other options.
Total AUM is approximately $4 billion as of 2025-2026, which includes Fund I, Fund II, and affiliated vehicles. The firm has not yet announced a third flagship fund publicly.
Portfolio Exits
This is the section that matters most to LPs evaluating performance. I will be direct: Brighton Park does not disclose fund-level IRRs or TVPI multiples. No audited performance data is publicly available. What I can tell you is what we know from public transaction records.
Paradox (acquired by Workday, $1 billion, August 2025). Paradox built conversational AI for frontline and high-volume hiring. Their product, Olivia, handled candidate screening, scheduling, and onboarding at scale. Workday acquired Paradox for $1.0 billion in cash. This is Brighton Park's largest disclosed exit by value. Mike Gregoire served on the board throughout the hold period.
NuORDER (acquired by Lightspeed, $425 million, 2021). NuORDER was a B2B wholesale commerce platform connecting brands with retailers. Lightspeed acquired NuORDER for $425 million in a mix of cash and shares. Brighton Park received the acquisition offer approximately six months after investing. They supported the founders through the full sale process.
Darktrace (IPO on London Stock Exchange, April 2021). Darktrace, the AI cybersecurity company, listed on the London Stock Exchange at a market cap of approximately £1.7 billion. Shares surged 43% on debut and peaked at roughly £7 billion. Brighton Park crossed a major shareholding threshold in March 2022, then progressively reduced its stake to 3.94% voting rights by April 2024. Thoma Bravo later took Darktrace private.
Indegene (IPO on BSE/NSE, India, May 2024). Brighton Park and Carlyle jointly took a $200 million minority stake in Indegene, a pharmaceutical commercialization platform, in 2021. Indegene's Indian IPO was 70.3 times oversubscribed. Brighton Park sold up to 8.4 million shares in the offering through its Genesis Fund I SPV.
Two exits above $400 million in under 18 months, plus two successful public market liquidity events. That is a credible track record for a firm that did not exist before 2019.
Recent Investments
TickPick ($250 million majority stake, August 2024). TickPick is a no-fee live event ticketing marketplace. At the time Brighton Park invested, TickPick had roughly $1 billion in annual ticket sales, 14 million mobile app downloads, and had grown ticket sales 8x in three years. The $250 million investment was the largest fundraise in ticketing industry history at the time of the deal. Rory McIlroy's Symphony Ventures co-invested. Previous backer GreyLion exited.
Silverfort ($116 million Series D, early 2024). Silverfort does identity security and zero trust infrastructure. At the time of Brighton Park's investment, Silverfort was growing revenue 100% year-over-year. The $116 million round was the fifth-largest funding round by an Israel-based startup during a period when Israeli startup funding had hit five-year lows. Brighton Park led the deal.
Other recent portfolio additions include PortSwigger ($112 million, the company behind Burp Suite security testing tools) and Storyblok ($80 million Series C in June 2024).
How Brighton Park Differs from GA, Vista, and Insight
Dzialga spent 20 years at General Atlantic before leaving to start Brighton Park. General Atlantic today manages approximately $118 billion. Brighton Park manages approximately $4 billion. That size difference is not a weakness; it is the product. At $4 billion, Brighton Park can give every portfolio company meaningful attention. At $118 billion, that is structurally impossible.
General Atlantic invests across technology, consumer, financial services, healthcare, and life sciences in markets around the world. Brighton Park invests in software, cybersecurity, healthcare IT, and data analytics, with concentrated checks and an explicitly founder-focused model. Brighton Park has been named to Inc.'s Founder-Friendly Investor list for four consecutive years from 2022 to 2025.
Insight Partners manages approximately $90 billion and is stage-agnostic, writing checks from seed through pre-IPO. Insight's operating team, Onsite, has more than 130 dedicated operational professionals. Brighton Park's differentiation on the operational side is structural rather than staffing: Mike Gregoire, a two-time Fortune 500 CEO currently sitting on the boards of AMD and Smartsheet, is an active partner on the investment team. You do not add that to your staffing chart.
Vista Equity Partners focuses on software buyouts, typically taking majority control of mature software businesses. Brighton Park takes growth stakes in scaling companies, often minority positions, with a partnership orientation rather than a control mandate. Different instrument, different risk profile, different return distribution.
Brighton Park's stated thesis: concentrate capital in fewer companies, invest only in sectors they know deeply, provide operators with direct access to an investment team that has built and sold billion-dollar businesses, and treat founders as partners rather than targets. Their website says it plainly: "Join us, and our undivided attention is yours."
What This Means for LPs Evaluating Growth Equity
If you are an institutional allocator building a growth equity sleeve, Brighton Park fits a specific profile. They are not a diversified mega-fund. They are not a venture firm with growth ambitions. They are purpose-built for one thing: taking meaningful stakes in software companies with proven revenue and helping those companies reach acquisition or IPO outcomes in the $400 million to $2 billion range.
The LP base for Fund II included endowments, foundations, family offices, public pension funds, corporate pension funds, and financial institutions from North America and globally. No specific LP names are publicly disclosed, which is standard practice for private equity funds at this size.
A few things I would want to verify before committing capital: Brighton Park has not disclosed fund-level performance metrics for Fund I. The $1 billion Workday exit and the $425 million Lightspeed exit are encouraging data points, but they do not constitute a full picture of Fund I returns. You need to see the full distribution of outcomes across all Fund I investments to assess actual performance. I would push hard for that data in the diligence process.
The firm also just opened a London office in July 2025, led by Tom Hussey, to expand into European markets. Geographic expansion at a concentrated-portfolio firm carries execution risk. Worth watching.
What I do not question is the pedigree. Dzialga chaired the General Atlantic investment committee for a decade. Gregoire sold two software companies to Oracle and Broadcom, respectively, before joining as co-founder. The question is whether that pedigree translates into repeatable, fund-level returns. The exit track record is directionally positive. A verified Fund I DPI number would be definitive.
The Honest Caveat
Brighton Park Capital is not accessible to retail accredited investors directly. Their LP base consists of institutional investors: pension funds, endowments, foundations, family offices with significant allocations. If you are an individual accredited investor, you are not writing a check directly into Brighton Park Fund III. Your path to this type of exposure is through a fund-of-funds manager with a growth equity allocation, a secondary fund with Brighton Park holdings, or co-investment opportunities through a placement agent relationship, none of which are straightforward.
That said, knowing this firm exists matters. If you are working with an RIA or a multi-family office building your alternatives portfolio, Brighton Park is worth putting on your radar and asking your advisor about. The performance data is limited but the structural thesis is sound, the team pedigree is elite, and the exit record — two transactions above $400 million in under 18 months — is hard to ignore.
Author Disclosure: Jeff Barnes, MBA has no personal position in any company, fund, or platform named in this article. Angel Investors Network has no current commercial relationship with any party mentioned. AIN provides marketing and education services, not investment advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal.
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About the Author
Jeff Barnes, MBA