Jill Hardies

Jill Hardies is a finance and private-equity professional based in North Carolina. She earned a Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A.) from the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School (2013–2017), concentrating in investment banking and multinational finance. Before her professional career, she was a competitive distance runner — a four-time all-state cross-country honoree in Illinois who posted one of the fastest cross-country times in Illinois high-school history around 2010 — and she competed in cross country and track for the University of North Carolina.

She began her career in the deal world as a Summer Financial Analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch (2016), then joined Charlotte-based investment bank BlackArch Partners as an Investment Banking Analyst (2017–2019), where she worked on M&A and advisory transactions.

From 2019 to 2022, Hardies was a Private Equity (Senior) Associate at Frontier Growth (then operating as Frontier Capital), the Charlotte-based growth-equity firm founded in 1999 that invests exclusively in software and technology-enabled services companies. In that role she evaluated deals, built financial models and analyses, and conducted due diligence on prospective vertical-SaaS investments — the core associate-level work of sourcing and vetting growth-stage software companies.

In 2022 she moved to the operating side, joining AccessOne — a Charlotte-based patient-financing / healthcare fintech company — as Director of Financial Planning & Strategy, and has since been listed as Vice President of Finance & Strategy. As of 2026 her active role is in corporate finance at AccessOne rather than as a practicing investor.

*Reflecting the Frontier Growth strategy she executed as an associate (this is the firm's thesis, not a personal fund):*

• Stage: Growth equity, not seed/angel — backing companies that already have real revenue and momentum.
• Check size: $5M–$30M initial equity investments.
• Revenue bar: $3M–$20M ARR with 25%+ annual growth.
• Sector: Vertical SaaS — industry-specific software (healthcare, public sector, legal, automotive, financial services, promotional products) — plus tech-enabled business services.
• What earns a "yes": Frontier describes itself as "people-first investors" backing "domain experts who are customer-obsessed," building mission-critical platforms with strong customer satisfaction and an emerging, defensible market-leadership position.

No individually attributed deals for Jill Hardies are public; as an associate (2019–2022) she supported the firm's diligence and analysis rather than leading named investments. Frontier Growth's portfolio broadly comprises vertical-SaaS and tech-enabled-services companies fitting the $3M–$20M ARR profile above. *(No specific portfolio company can be sourced to her personally, so none are asserted here.)*