Ruzwana Bashir

Co-Founder & CEO Peek

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Ruzwana Bashir co-founded Peek in 2012 with Oskar Bruening and has led it as Chief Executive Officer since. Peek operates on both sides of a market that had resisted being organised: a consumer marketplace where travellers discover and book tours, activities and experiences, and Peek Pro, the booking and operations software that the operators of those activities run their businesses on. The pairing is the strategy. Activities are an enormous, radically fragmented category — a kayak outfitter, a wine tour, a helicopter ride — run by small operators who mostly took bookings by telephone, and no marketplace could list reliable availability until the operators had software that knew what their availability was. Peek reports more than 150 million customers served. Bashir reached it by an unusually varied route: investment banking at Goldman Sachs in London, private equity at Blackstone, Gilt Groupe, and the founding team of Art.sy in New York, after reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics at New College, Oxford, serving as President of the Oxford Union and taking a Harvard MBA as a Fulbright Scholar.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Peek in 2012 with Oskar Bruening and has been its Chief Executive Officer throughout.
• Built Peek as a two-sided business, combining a consumer experiences marketplace with Peek Pro, the booking and operations platform used by tour and activity operators.
• Grew the platform past 150 million customers served.
• Raised $5 million in 2014, $10 million in 2016 and $23 million in 2018, from investors including Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Jack Dorsey, David Bonderman, SV Angel and CAA.
• Elected President of the Oxford Union in 2004, only the second Muslim to hold the post after Benazir Bhutto, hosting speakers including Senator John McCain and Boris Johnson.
• Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2012 and to Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in 2014, and named an EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist in 2022.
• Worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and private equity at The Blackstone Group before moving into technology at Gilt Groupe and on the founding team of Art.sy.
• Became a prominent public advocate for survivors of sexual abuse after writing about her own experience in The Guardian in 2014.

Professional Journey

Bashir grew up in Skipton, North Yorkshire, and attended Skipton Girls’ High School before going to New College, Oxford to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. In 2004 she was elected President of the Oxford Union, the university’s debating society and one of the more conspicuous positions in British student life; she was only the second Muslim to hold it, after Benazir Bhutto, and hosted speakers including Senator John McCain and Boris Johnson during her term.

Her early career followed the conventional path out of Oxford: investment banking at Goldman Sachs in London, then private equity at The Blackstone Group. She left it for a Harvard MBA, funded as a Fulbright Scholar, and came out into technology rather than back into finance — first at Gilt Groupe, the flash-sale retailer that was one of the defining consumer internet companies of its moment, and then on the founding team of Art.sy in New York, which was attempting to make the art market navigable by anyone who was not already inside it.

Peek followed in 2012. The founding observation came from the traveller’s side: planning the experiences part of a trip was disproportionately hard relative to flights and hotels, both of which had been solved a decade earlier. The reason was structural. Activities are supplied by tens of thousands of tiny operators, few of whom had any system for managing their own bookings, and an aggregator cannot show real availability that the supplier does not itself track.

So Peek built both halves. The consumer marketplace curates activities, presents them well and makes them bookable on any device, with curated itineraries the company calls “Perfect Days”. Peek Pro gives operators the reservation, scheduling and business management software they were missing — which serves them directly and, not incidentally, generates the live inventory the marketplace needs. Bruening, as co-founder and CTO, came from VMware and Symantec with degrees from MIT and the San Francisco Studio School, and built the technical side.

The company raised progressively larger rounds — $5 million in 2014, $10 million in 2016, $23 million in 2018 — and drew an investor list that is heavily weighted toward operators and consumer-brand builders rather than traditional travel investors: Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Jack Dorsey, David Bonderman, SV Angel and the talent agency CAA. Bashir was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2012, to Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in 2014, and was an EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist in 2022.

Alongside the company, Bashir has been a public advocate on sexual abuse. In 2014 she wrote in The Guardian about her own experience as a survivor and about how severely abuse is underreported in British-Pakistani communities — a disclosure made deliberately and publicly, and one she has continued to speak about since.

Education

Harvard Business School

Master of Business Administration, studied as a Fulbright Scholar

New College, University of Oxford

Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy, Politics and Economics