In conversation with Capsa AI’s CRO Jack Fisher

Jack Fisher is Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Capsa AI, an Outward portfolio company building the AI operating system for private capital which closed its $18m Series A in early June.

After eleven years with PitchBook and helping the company grow from all the way from Series A, Jack made the deliberate choice to jump back into early-stage building and joined Capsa AI in January 2026. We sat down with Jack to talk about why he made that leap, what a CRO actually does before the headcount arrives, and how he thinks about building a go-to-market function that can scale without breaking.

Outward has first backed Capsa AI in 2024, leading their Seed round – you can read our investment thesis here.

I wasn’t proactively looking. But when Capsa came across my desk, it ticked every box in a way I hadn’t expected. I know the private capital markets space well, I knew some of their clients, and when I did my own due diligence I came away genuinely blown away by what they’d built at seed stage – a serious product, with real product-market fit, already delivering value.

Beyond the product, I truly believe there’s space for a vertical player to own AI in private capital markets. Others have touched the space, but nobody is doing it with the laser focus that Capsa has. And the window is open right now. LPs are pressuring funds to formalise their AI strategy, AI committees are being set up. The timing felt right.

And then there are the founders. Callum and Danyal are two of the most impressive people I’ve met. Callum has built a product that outperforms competitors who’ve raised ten times what Capsa had at seed. Danyal has the domain expertise and the drive that you just want on your side. I’d be wrong not to name them as a big part of why I made the leap.

The title is a little misleading. In any given week I’m a Sales Development Rep (SDR), an Account Executive (AE), a Revenue Ops manager, a marketer, an account manager, and a team manager. I’ve sat in a booth cold calling people because that’s what was needed. I’ve been building sales playbooks at the same time as running demos and negotiating contracts.

That’s partly because of what I found when I arrived. The team had done a lot of things well, but the commercial infrastructure simply hadn’t been built yet: the CRM hygiene, the sales playbook, the repeatable outbound motion, the pipeline discipline. None of it existed, because there’d never been a go-to-market function to build it. So the day-to-day has to flex around whatever needs doing but the priority never changes: driving ARR comes first. If a client calls at 11PM, I pick up.

What can never suffer though is the infrastructure work happening in the background. I focused first on the outbound motion, building something that would get us consistently in front of the right people, then the CRM, then clear pipeline stages. Callum and Danyal gave me genuine trust to own all of that end to end, and in return I make sure they always have full visibility. Every week, Danyal knows exactly where the pipeline stands, what the conversion metrics look like, where things are stalling. Trust has to come with transparency.

But I also bring Danyal in deliberately, he’s our secret weapon. His domain expertise, his founder story, his ability to walk into a room of private equity partners and speak their language – that’s not something I’d ever deprioritise. I own how we take the product to market, but part of that is knowing when to deploy him.

Getting the pipeline discipline right early was important well before we went out to raise. We needed to show investors not just that we had pipeline, but that it was qualified and converting. Getting to the point where we could say “when we reach proof of concept, we convert at close to 70%” – and back it up with data – was critical. If you say that as a woolly figure without the numbers behind it, you’ll be met with scepticism.

The founders are the stars of the show. Full stop. But I was heavily involved. A lot of the investor questions came to me around the go-to-market: what have you built, is the pipeline real, how are you transitioning from founder-led sales, what’s the plan to scale? You need the person who owns the number to be able to stand up in front of investors and justify every decision.

My background at PitchBook helped too. There’s more overlap between early-stage PitchBook and early-stage Capsa than you might expect – both involved taking a new product into a market of sophisticated, sceptical buyers who weren’t sure they needed it yet. By the time I left PitchBook, it had become the industry standard. 

Being able to say “I’ve been through this before, I’ve made these mistakes before, I know what they cost, I won’t make them again” carries weight when you’re trying to convince investors you can scale responsibly.

It means I can stop trying to do everything at once. Immediate priorities are senior enterprise AEs in London and New York, SDRs to support the outbound motion, a RevOps manager, and a head of marketing. But I’m meticulous about getting the infrastructure right before people arrive: playbooks, onboarding, the foundations. If we hire quickly but poorly, or bring people into chaos, we slow down. And slowing down right now is a real risk.

As the team builds out, my role shifts to orchestrating those functions, unblocking people, and staying close to clients myself. I want to be on planes, in rooms. The US market is going to be the most important for us, and that probably means I’ll be heading out there in relatively short order to help build the infrastructure alongside Danyal. Being in front of clients matters, you can’t manage that from behind a desk.

Two things.

The first is pace. The market is moving fast, and there’s a genuine window right now for a focused vertical player in private capital AI. We have to move at speed. We don’t get to build the plane on the ground, we’re building it mid-air. Hiring quickly and correctly, without tripping ourselves up, is the challenge.

The second is maintaining standards as we scale. Right now, with a team of 15, we can manage every conversation carefully. We understand the change-management element of AI sales. These are sophisticated clients who are still working out their strategy, and you have to go on that journey with them, not sell at them. When the team is 40 people by end of year, we cannot let that slip. Reputation in private capital markets travels fast. Everyone knows everyone.

Capsa got the timing right. You see so often a CRO or head of sales brought in before there’s real product-market fit or meaningful logos to build on. That’s a very hard environment for anyone, however good they are.

What made Capsa a good situation to walk into was simple: proven product-market fit, tier-one clients already in the door, ARR at a strong level for a seed-stage company. That let me come in and sell from day one, rather than spending months working out whether the product resonates.

You also need someone who can both sell and build simultaneously. If they’re spending 100% of their time on deals, you’ve just replaced founder-led sales with CRO-led sales. You haven’t fixed the underlying problem. The goal is to build the repeatable motion that means you’re not dependent on any one person.

And finally, give that person real trust. Let them do things differently to how you would. Danyal has been exceptional at this. He’s course-corrected me where needed, and I’ve listened. But he’s also let me own the function, make mistakes, and build it out in my own way. That dynamic makes all the difference.