Nilam Ganenthiran had run Instacart as its president. In January 2024 he started over with a company that bought other people's overlooked software businesses.
That was the move that surprised the industry. He had been a partner at D1 Capital, a large investment firm, and then a senior executive at a grocery delivery giant. A Canadian, he could have chosen almost any next step. He chose to buy small software and services companies in neglected corners of the economy: education, finance, logistics, recreation.
Amar Varma of Mantle and Fidji Simo, who runs applications at OpenAI, were among them.
The pitch was compact. Many of those firms were profitable, run by founders who had never needed venture capital and had never been given serious engineering help. Beacon would buy them, add AI and shared tech, design and fintech teams, and leave the founders to run their own shops.
He joined forces with Divya Gupta, an American engineer and former Sequoia partner who had also worked at Databricks, and the early investors came fast. Amar Varma of Mantle and Fidji Simo, who runs applications at OpenAI, were among them.
Then the pace became startling. By November 2025 Beacon had raised a US$250 million Series B led by General Catalyst, Lightspeed and D1 Capital, bringing total funding to about US$335 million and the valuation to US$1 billion. It was buying roughly one company every two weeks, more than 30 per cent of them Canadian, including Let's Camp, PowerUp and Viefund.
Ganenthiran drew a hard line against the obvious comparison. Beacon, he told BetaKit, is the anti-private equity firm. It buys to hold forever, avoids cost-cutting, and prefers sellers to stay on. He also said the bootstrapped founders had been easier partners than venture-backed ones, who tend to arrive with different expectations.
By mid-2026 the numbers had moved again. A US$225 million Series C came from General Catalyst and HarbourVest, sooner than he expected. More than 30 businesses had been acquired, and portfolio earnings were up more than 50 per cent, partly because the acquired companies had adopted AI. Beacon hired Mark Schaaf, formerly CTO at Superhuman and Instacart, as chief operating and product officer, and Goutham Buchi, formerly AngelList's CTO, as CTO.
What remains to be seen is whether hold-forever survives integration at that speed. Buying companies is a quick skill. Keeping thirty founders motivated inside one structure is a slower one.
The lesson for founders may be a reversal. Beacon makes money not by inventing something new, but by taking seriously what others had overlooked. Sometimes the opening is the business nobody was bothering to improve.