Pandemic Darlings The pandemic economy, in original documents
Home Profiles Peek Profile: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status

Profiles · Companies and entities

ProfileCompany or group

Peek Profile: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status

Other company

PPP
Type
Company or group
Role
Other company
Programs
PPP
Updated
  • Category: travel and hospitality
  • Pandemic layoffs: a mass layoff in March 2020, 45 employees reported, mostly business roles in Salt Lake City (Layoffs.fyi)
  • Last updated: 2026-09-25

Pandemic-role map

  • Reader shorthand: booking software and a marketplace for tours and activities, a category that stopped when travel did.
  • What Peek did for customers: sold online booking, point-of-sale and automation tools (Peek Pro) to tour and activity operators, and ran a consumer marketplace for booking them.
  • What broke in the pandemic: tours, attractions and travel experiences were canceled or capacity-limited.
  • Relief role: a PPP referral channel. Peek told its operators to apply for PPP loans "through our partner Womply" and set up a lender-marketplace link with SoFi's Lantern.
  • Own relief: two PPP loans to Peek Travel, Inc. totaling about $5.4 million, both forgiven.

Founders, Executives, and Investors

Ruzwana Bashir is Peek's co-founder and chief executive. Oskar Bruening was co-founder and chief technology officer in April 2020.

Peek's $80 million Series C, announced November 23, 2021, was led by WestCap, the growth-equity firm of former Airbnb and Blackstone executive Laurence A. Tosi, with Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Earlier investors named in that release include Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt, Kayak founder Paul English and Cathay Innovation. The $70 million Series D of November 2025 was led by Springcoast Partners.

Business Before the Pandemic

Peek, based in San Francisco, combines business software with a consumer marketplace for "fun things to do (think: wine tours, watersports, skydiving, and art classes)," in its own description. Peek Pro supplies online booking, point-of-sale and automation tools such as inventory management, dynamic pricing, waivers and marketing analytics.

What the Pandemic Changed

Layoffs.fyi reported that Peek conducted a mass layoff in March 2020, citing multiple LinkedIn posts by employees: 45 employees, mostly business roles, with a published list of 25 former employees that skewed toward the Salt Lake City office.

On April 9, 2020, Peek announced a partnership with Womply, which it described as a registered loan agent working with SBA-approved banks, to help tour and activity operators prepare PPP applications and collect documents in advance, and to "save their place in line" with SBA-approved lenders. "At this time, our main priority as a company is to help tour operators across the industry access the tools and capital they need to weather this unprecedented storm," Bruening said in the announcement.

Peek's operator-facing COVID-19 guide, "A Guide to Accessing and Protecting Capital," pointed customers to federal loans through partners. "If you haven't yet applied for a PPP loan, we recommend that you do so immediately through our partner Womply," it said, adding that "Womply's lenders move fast and have already been able to help businesses rejected or ignored by their bank get approved." The same page promoted a tie-up with SoFi's Lantern marketplace and summarized the April 2020 relief package, including $310 billion more for PPP and $60 billion more for the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program.

Peek also borrowed. SBA's PPP loan data record a first-draw loan of $3,370,340 to Peek Travel, Inc. of San Francisco, approved April 15, 2020 through Harvest Small Business Finance, with 115 jobs reported; SBA recorded forgiveness of $3,258,949.12 on March 22, 2022. A second-draw loan of $1,999,950, approved January 23, 2021 through the same lender with 88 jobs reported, was forgiven in the amount of $2,015,292.08 on November 17, 2021.

Business After the First Shock

The Series C was pitched as money "to Power the 2022 Travel Comeback." Peek said then that its platform had handled nearly $2 billion in bookings and served 35 million customers, and that it would use the capital to triple its team. "After helping thousands of travel and local businesses survive the pandemic, we've now been arming them with the digitization tools needed to scale," Bashir said.

Where the Company Is Now

Peek is a private company. On November 20, 2025 it raised $70 million and announced the acquisitions of ACME Ticketing, which sells ticketing, membership and donation systems to cultural institutions, and Connect&GO, which adds RFID-based attraction management. Peek said the deals extend its reach to more than 150 million consumers across museums, theme parks, tours and attractions, that it handles more than $1.5 billion in bookings a year and more than $7 billion in total, and that its AI pricing tool has lifted operator revenue 5% to 20%. Bashir remains chief executive.

Source Notes

Back to top