Pete Karabas

Pete Karabas is a Founding Partner of KEY Investment Partners, where he leads the firm’s strategy and operations, is actively engaged in investing and portfolio oversight, and serves on the firm’s Investment Committee. His responsibilities span new investments, from underwriting through execution, as well as KEY’s capital formation and investor relationships.

Since co-founding KEY in 2018, Pete has played a critical role in building the firm from a specialist investor in the highly regulated cannabis industry into an institutional platform pursuing opportunities in complex, rapidly evolving, and capital-constrained markets.

As an investor, Pete has led six portfolio investments at KEY, including Jeeter, Jage Media, Farmaceutical RX, Front Range Biosciences, and Sweet Leaf Madison Capital, with responsibility spanning origination, underwriting, due diligence, structuring, negotiation, and closing. He serves as Chairman of the Board of BDSA, the cannabis industry’s leading market intelligence and analytics provider, and as a board member and strategic advisor to three additional KEY portfolio companies, where he works closely with management teams on strategy, governance, and long-term value creation.

Pete has also built much of the operating foundation behind KEY’s investment platform, leading the firm’s strategic initiatives and shaping how KEY executes transactions and manages its portfolio. He partners closely with his fellow founders and partners on new opportunities, portfolio company matters, and the continued growth of the firm.

Prior to co-founding KEY, Pete spent three years as a real estate investor at Partners Group, a global private markets investment firm, where he originated, underwrote, and executed large portfolio transactions. He and his team completed 12 portfolio acquisitions representing approximately $700 million of equity across $2.5 billion of gross asset value, including four transactions Pete personally originated, representing $175 million of equity. Originally from Chicago, Pete relocated to Denver in 2016 to help build out Partners Group’s U.S. real estate platform, where he saw the cannabis industry’s early growth firsthand and chose to focus his career on investing in and scaling high-growth businesses in emerging, highly regulated markets.

Earlier in his career, Pete spent four years on the investments team at Equity Residential, focused on the acquisition and asset management of Class A multifamily properties.

Pete holds a BBA in Finance and Real Estate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is married with one son and currently lives in South Florida.