Ruzwana Bashir

Current Company

Peek.com — Founder & CEO

Building the Booking Engine for Experiences

Ruzwana Bashir founded Peek.com to bring technology and scale to the tours and activities industry — a $150 billion market that was still largely managed with pen and paper when she entered it. Born and raised in northern England, Bashir studied at Oxford and Harvard Business School before working at Goldman Sachs and Blackstone. It was during her time in finance that she recognized the massive gap between how easy it was to book a hotel or flight online and how painful it was to book a kayaking tour or cooking class.

Peek.com provides booking software, payment processing, and marketing tools to thousands of experience operators — from small-town zipline companies to national park tour providers. Under Ruzwana Bashir's leadership, Peek has raised over $100 million in funding and powers millions of bookings annually. The platform handles the operational complexity that most small experience businesses can't manage on their own: dynamic pricing, waivers, resource scheduling, and channel distribution.

Scaling a Market Nobody Else Wanted

The tours and activities industry was overlooked by most venture-backed startups because it's fragmented, operationally messy, and dominated by small businesses with limited technology budgets. Ruzwana Bashir saw those same characteristics as her competitive advantage — the harder the market is to serve, the deeper the moat once you've built the software layer. Peek's strategy is to become the operating system for experience-based businesses, handling everything from point-of-sale to online booking to customer communications.

As CEO, Ruzwana Bashir has also become a prominent voice on diversity in venture capital and technology leadership. Her background — a British-Pakistani woman who grew up in a working-class northern English town and built a venture-backed technology company in San Francisco — challenges the pattern-matching that dominates Silicon Valley's funding culture. Bashir's success with Peek demonstrates that the best founders are often the ones who see markets that others can't, because they come from the communities those markets serve.