GapMaps, the location intelligence platform used by global retail and franchise brands — including Nando’s, which cut its Asia expansion planning by 40% using GapMaps Live — to plan physical network expansion, has appointed Peter Holmes as Chief Executive Officer. The announcement, made on April 24, 2026, comes as the Australian-headquartered software company accelerates growth across Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, North America, and Europe and positions GapMaps Live as an end-to-end SaaS platform for site selection, performance forecasting, and trade-area analytics.
The CEO appointment is the most significant leadership move at GapMaps in 2026 and follows a sustained run of new feature launches, multi-country dataset additions, and channel partnerships. The company said Holmes will own GapMaps’ core operations, customer strategy, and global go-to-market execution, with a particular focus on enterprise growth and strategic partnerships across the brand’s most active markets.
For brands evaluating master-franchise territories or new-country entry, the CEO change matters because GapMaps Live is a core decision-support tool used to evaluate trade areas, model store cannibalisation, and stress-test unit-economics assumptions before signing development agreements. A CEO with deep enterprise SaaS experience means faster product velocity, clearer commercial terms, and tighter integration with the demographic, mobility, and consumer-segmentation data layers franchisors increasingly rely on.
Holmes brings extensive experience in scaling enterprise SaaS businesses and building high-performance commercial teams. According to GapMaps, his mandate covers three priorities: scaling enterprise revenue across the Asia-Pacific, MENA, and North American regions; deepening the GapMaps Live platform’s AI and forecasting capabilities; and building out partnerships with consumer-data providers, real-estate platforms, and franchise consultancies.
“GapMaps is uniquely positioned at the intersection of data, AI, and real-world expansion,” said Holmes.
The platform underpinning the company’s growth strategy is a cloud-based location intelligence system that consolidates the inputs franchisors typically scatter across multiple tools. Customers use it to identify white-space opportunities, model store-network performance, and prioritise trade areas before committing capital.
The leadership change lands at a moment when international franchisors are leaning more heavily on data-led territory due-diligence. In MENA in particular, where intra-city demographics, expat density, and footfall patterns vary block by block, brands signing master-franchise development agreements increasingly require granular evidence that the proposed unit count is achievable. GapMaps’ product strategy, as articulated by Holmes, points toward exactly that — moving from isolated insights to a single system that helps franchisors decide where to grow and execute locally.
Three near-term indicators will signal how aggressively GapMaps executes under the new CEO: pace of new-market data additions, scale of enterprise customer logos in the GCC and Southeast Asia, and the depth of integration between GapMaps Live and partner segmentation datasets. Each of those points is directly relevant to the way territory-development plans are evaluated and defended in master-franchise negotiations.
Once a niche category bought mostly by big-box retail real-estate teams, location intelligence has moved into the operational core of franchise systems. The GapMaps CEO appointment is part of a broader pattern across the franchise software stack — established platforms tightening their commercial leadership, accelerating AI investment, and chasing the multi-country master-franchise opportunity that VF Franchise Consulting works on every day for clients across Asia and the MENA region.
Source: iTWire — GapMaps Names Peter Holmes CEO to Lead Global Expansion
