5 Questions with Restive’s Cameron Peake

We’re excited to formally welcome Restive to the NVNG portfolio — a specialized early-stage venture firm backing ambitious fintech founders building the future of financial services. Focused exclusively on fintech infrastructure, payments, insurance, and the financial layer of vertical SaaS, Restive combines deep domain expertise with a hands-on approach that helps founders move faster from day one. Their conviction around the next wave of AI-driven transformation in financial services, paired with a strong operator mindset, makes them a natural fit for the NVNG ecosystem.

Q: Can you tell us about Restive’s origin story and superpowers?

The Restive team has had a long history of leading, building, and scaling companies and products within fintech. We understand that to be successful in this market, it requires industry knowledge and connections that we bring to our early investments to help them execute and grow more quickly.

The approach for Restive emerged from Ryan’s time leading the Financial Solutions Lab at J.P. Morgan. After investing in early-stage companies in partnership with one of the largest brands in financial services, Ryan and Tyler were excited to take those experiences and build a standalone fund. Cameron joined at the start of Fund II to lean on her experience with scaling teams and companies.

One of Restive’s core superpowers is our deep domain expertise. This allows us to roll up our sleeves and truly help our early teams on everything from product to risk models to banking partnerships to recruiting. This allows our companies to move more quickly, and hopefully avoid many of the mistakes that we’ve made and seen over the years!

Q: Why are Restive and NVNG a good fit/what makes you excited to work together?

We love working with corporate partners! NVNG’s LP base (and the financial services ecosystem in Wisconsin more broadly) make them natural partners for us. We see our corporate relationships as being incredibly symbiotic, from surfacing partnership or commercial opportunities, sharing market trends, or teeing up acquisitions.

Q: What are trends you are seeing in venture capital within your thesis and stage?

Writing in February 2026, a few trends stand out:

• We’re seeing entirely new infrastructure being built out just for AI. This includes things like tech to enable agentic payments (delegating payments from human to agents), agentic discoverability like Google’s UCP protocol, and more.
• Given that financial services has been dominated by professional service-heavy business models, AI is poised to upend it. We’re seeing a trend where 2/3 of the founders we speak with want to use AI tools to 10x employees of those industries, and 1/3 of founders want to use AI to build new business models to totally upend them.
• We’re seeing AI lead to massive efficiencies in internal operations. Startups are using these tools to keep headcount lean and scale quickly. We’ve seen the ratio of revenue/ employee dramatically increase, and it has follow-on effects around downstream capital needs, founder dilution, compensation structures, etc.
• In addition to the points above on low dilution and little need for capital, follow-on financings are happening very quickly and are very competitive. As such, we believe the Seed stage is the last chance to build meaningful ownership in the best companies.

Q: What are you most excited for as you look at the state of the spaces you invest in?

A lot has been made about AI as a platform shift, and we are absolutely seeing this play out. The companies that are being built today have a dramatic cost advantage compared to those just five years ago. New product capabilities are being introduced that weren’t possible until recently. Consumers and businesses are adopting new technologies. And we think that startups are poised to realize outsized gains here, as the incumbents (at least right now) are also getting lift in their core business and not trying to compete head-to-head with the new entrants. Investing through this wave of innovation has – and continues to be! – incredibly exciting.

Q: What unique approach does Restive take when evaluating a deal or working with founders?

As former founders and operators, we love rolling up our sleeves and working alongside founders in our portfolio. Whether it is supporting on personnel issues, product feedback, or fundraising, we strive to be a trusted partner in the process. We also bring in more structured engagement, such as a “speed networking” day, trips to meet with regulators, and events with later-stage investors. This builds much deeper relationships with our founders and a much more intimate understanding of the business than your typical investor.