For most investors, the path to wealth runs through public markets, real estate, or a slow climb up the corporate ladder. Jace Graham built a different road. As CEO and Founder of Rising Phoenix Resources, Graham has spent nearly a decade quietly assembling one of the most distinctive alternative investment platforms in the American energy sector — a multi-vertical firm built on mineral rights, oil and gas royalties, real estate, and now the infrastructure powering the AI revolution.
It started with a wagon of drill pipe.
Four Generations of Texas Energy
Long before Jace Graham was raising capital from family offices and high-net-worth investors, his great-grandmother sold a dry goods store in Muskogee, Oklahoma, used the proceeds to buy a wagon of drill pipe, and moved the family to East Texas to chase the oil boom. That moment seeded four generations of energy entrepreneurs in the Graham family. His father, Jim Graham, ran his own deals for forty years until his passing in 2019 — a self-made operator who taught his son that the best opportunities in oil and gas are found on the ground, in the relationships, and in the willingness to do the work most people won’t.
Born and raised in Dallas, Graham was immersed in the industry from childhood. He earned his degree from Cornell University in 2001, then started in hospitality — a deliberate detour that taught him operational discipline and customer service before he ever touched a mineral deed. He transitioned to oil and gas as an independent landman, learning the granular work of mineral ownership and lease negotiations from the ground up. By 2016, he had founded Rising Phoenix Resources and started building the platform that exists today.
The Rising Phoenix Resources Platform
Rising Phoenix Resources operates as a multi-vertical alternative investment firm. Rather than a single fund or single strategy, the platform spans seven distinct business lines that share a common operating discipline: ground-game sourcing, conservative underwriting, in-house technical expertise, and a long-term orientation toward both investors and assets.
Rising Phoenix Capital is the capital-raising arm of the platform, structuring and placing investment opportunities for accredited investors, family offices, and registered investment advisors. Rising Phoenix Capital organizes its offerings around three core strategies designed to serve different investor objectives: a debt strategy structured as promissory notes collateralized by the firm’s mineral holdings, offering investors a fixed-income profile backed by hard assets; an income strategy built around producing mineral funds that generate monthly royalty distributions; and a growth strategy providing exposure to direct drilling programs for investors seeking higher-risk, higher-return participation in active production. Each strategy carries its own risk-and-return profile, and investors are matched to strategies based on their objectives, risk tolerance, and qualification status.
Rising Phoenix Royalties is the firm’s flagship mineral acquisition business. Operating across the Permian Basin and other established producing regions, the team sources non-marketed mineral interests directly from owners — often through proprietary tax-roll research and an on-the-ground acquisition team. Acquired assets are placed into producing mineral funds that generate monthly royalty distributions for investors, while a subset of acquisitions is flipped to private-equity-backed counterparties for capital event returns.
Rising Phoenix Real Estate acquires, rehabilitates, and finances residential properties, with a focus on serving first-time homebuyers and underserved borrowers through seller financing structured in compliance with Dodd-Frank.
Mi Casa Rising Phoenix is the platform’s private lending company, providing financing solutions structured to serve borrowers and projects that traditional lenders often can’t reach.
Su Casa Rising Phoenix is the firm’s hard money lending company, offering short-term capital tailored for real estate investors actively engaged in property acquisition and rehabilitation projects.
Rising Phoenix Energy is the platform’s newest vertical, applying four generations of gas and midstream expertise to one of the largest emerging infrastructure opportunities in the country: behind-the-meter, natural-gas-powered data center development for AI workloads. By bypassing grid interconnection delays that can stretch beyond five years, Rising Phoenix Energy aims to deliver dispatchable power directly to hyperscale and GPU cloud operators on a modular, scalable basis.
What ties the platform together is Graham’s conviction that the best opportunities in American energy and real estate are sourced, not bought — found through relationships, ground-game research, and decades of operator experience, rather than through auctions and brokered processes.
Where Business Success Fuels Community Impact
Anchoring the platform is the Rising Phoenix Family Foundation — the firm’s philanthropic and community engagement arm. The Foundation supports nonprofit organizations creating opportunity and long-term security in the communities where Rising Phoenix lives and works.
For Jace Graham, the Foundation is more than a checkbook. “Financial contributions matter, but real impact comes from time, leadership, and personal commitment,” he says. Every member of the Rising Phoenix team is encouraged to be actively involved giving energy, expertise, and presence to causes that matter to them.
At its core, the Foundation reflects a conviction Graham returns to often: business and community should rise together.
A Track Record Built on Consistency
Across its oil and gas mineral and royalty portfolio, Rising Phoenix has built a track record that reflects both the strength of its sourcing and the discipline of its underwriting. From 2020 through 2025, the firm’s mineral funds delivered an average annual cash-on-cash distribution yield of approximately 17% to investors — the kind of consistent monthly income that has become the cornerstone of the Rising Phoenix model. Across the realized and active portfolio, funds have generated an average net equity multiple of approximately 1.47x, with leading vintages delivering as much as 2.25x net to investors.
“The math works because the work is real,” Graham says. “We don’t chase trends. We don’t model our way into a number we want to see. We buy producing assets at the right basis, we structure the deals so investors get paid first, and we let the wells do what they do. Over a decade of doing this, the discipline shows up in the numbers.”
The firm’s structure reinforces that discipline. Rising Phoenix co-invests alongside its limited partners in its funds and does not collect its promote until investors have been fully compensated. The result, Jace Graham argues, is an alignment of incentives that’s rare in the alternative investment space — and one that has shaped both the firm’s culture and its long-term relationships with the investors who have backed multiple funds across vintages.
The La Plata Peak Funds
Rising Phoenix Capital’s current flagship offerings are the La Plata Peak Fund I and La Plata Peak Fund II — both producing mineral funds targeting income, monthly distributions, and capital preservation. La Plata Peak I is offered through the registered investment advisory channel and is currently available on the Schwab platform, with an expected close of December 31, 2026. La Plata Peak II is structured as a 506(c) offering available for direct accredited investment alongside the RIA channel.
The name itself is personal. Graham has spent years climbing Colorado’s fourteeners — the state’s iconic 14,000-foot peaks — with his family during summers in the high country. Over time, he began naming his mineral funds after the mountains he and his family have summited together. La Plata Peak, a 14,343-foot summit in the Sawatch Range, is one of those climbs. “Naming the funds after fourteeners keeps the work connected to something real,” Jace Graham says. “Every fund takes preparation, discipline, and the willingness to keep climbing when it gets hard. That’s the same mindset we bring to building a portfolio for our investors.”
Both funds focus on producing mineral acquisitions in established basins — assets that generate royalty income from existing wells rather than depending on new drilling. For investors, the model translates into structured monthly distributions, exposure to a sector with significant tailwinds from LNG exports, AI data center power demand, and the broader buildout of American energy infrastructure, and tax advantages including the depletion allowance available to mineral owners.
Target return ranges and specific fund economics are disclosed in offering materials provided to qualified investors. The firm targets a 2-4 year hold and structures its funds so that investors receive their preferred return before the general partner participates in upside.
Rising Phoenix Energy: Powering AI
The newest chapter in the platform may be the most ambitious. Rising Phoenix Energy applies the same gas-and-pipeline expertise that built the family’s mineral business to one of technology’s most acute bottlenecks: powering AI.
As hyperscalers and GPU cloud operators wait years — sometimes more than five — for grid interconnections, Graham is leveraging four generations of North Texas midstream relationships to build behind-the-meter, gas-powered data centers that bypass the grid entirely. The model is modular: 150-200 acre sites engineered for 100-megawatt capacity, deployed in 10-megawatt increments as anchor tenants commit. A Washington-state advisory firm brings former Google deployment engineers and tenant relationships; a Dallas family office structures the capital.
“The constraint on AI isn’t compute anymore. It’s power,” Graham says. “And it turns out my family has been in the business of moving gas around North Texas for four generations. We have the relationships. We have the land. We have the engineering. The opportunity is hiding in plain sight if you’ve grown up in this world.”
The Team Behind the Platform
Jace Graham leads a team built to move efficiently across the platform’s multiple verticals. Adam Lapucha, P.E., Director of Investments and a licensed petroleum engineer, leads technical underwriting and acquisition evaluation across the firm’s mineral and energy strategies. Chad Simper, Director of Acquisitions, oversees three vertical sales teams responsible for sourcing and closing across the firm’s investment programs. Kelly Brown manages operations and investor relations, serving as the operational backbone of the platform and the primary point of contact for the firm’s investor base. Together, the team has been built deliberately and culturally — with a strong emphasis on the firm’s core values: Do Good, Play Offense, Live Kaizen, Positive Mindset, Own It.
Rising Phoenix Resources has earned recognition on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies in both 2022 and 2025 — a distinction earned by a select group of private companies nationwide. Graham is regularly invited to speak on oil and gas industry panels at major sector events including NAPE, the Mineral & Royalty Conference, Hart Energy events, and the Energy Council, where he is recognized as a respected voice among his professional peers. The firm has been featured in Yahoo Finance and Energies Media and works with Higier & Allen as securities counsel, Weaver and Tidwell LLP as auditor going forward, and Mick Law for third-party due diligence on its offerings.
What Graham Tells Aspiring Entrepreneurs
When asked what advice he gives founders early in their journey, Jace Graham doesn’t romanticize business ownership.
“Nobody is coming to save you. Entrepreneurship is sweat equity, pressure, and repetition. Most people want the outcome — but not the decade of uncertainty it takes to build something real.”
Jace Graham believes too many founders chase shortcuts instead of developing the discipline and resilience required to survive cycles, setbacks, and volatility. He talks often about a counterintuitive truth he’s seen play out over twenty years in business: the entrepreneurs who win aren’t the ones who fail the least — they’re the ones who fail the most.
“If you want a real formula for success, double your rate of failure. Most people treat failure like the enemy. It’s not. It’s the tuition. Every fund that didn’t hit, every deal that fell apart, every hire that didn’t work — those are the moments that taught me what actually matters. You can either be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it. The entrepreneurs who keep building are the ones who learn from it.”
“Setbacks aren’t the story — they’re the curriculum. Every hard season teaches you something if you’re willing to stay in the fight. Most people quit at year three because the excitement wears off and reality shows up. The ones who stay consistent, adapt, and keep showing up eventually separate themselves.”
Over the years, Graham has built Rising Phoenix around a handful of core operating principles that continue to shape the firm’s culture, investment philosophy, and long-term strategy.
Build Systems, Not Chaos
As Rising Phoenix expanded across minerals, real estate, private lending, and capital raising, Graham focused on operational systems, process documentation, accountability, and scalable execution.
“You can’t scale chaos. Every business hits a ceiling where hustle stops working and systems have to take over. The companies that break through are the ones that built the operating discipline before they needed it.”
Use Data, But Trust Experience
Graham combines disciplined underwriting and analytics with real-world operator experience gained through years of direct acquisition work across oil, gas, and real estate.
“Data matters. But experience matters too. Markets are emotional. Cycles repeat. Pattern recognition only comes from being in the trenches long enough to see the same movie play out three or four times.”
Stay Adaptable
Rather than staying locked into one vertical, Rising Phoenix built an integrated platform that allows capital and resources to move toward opportunity as markets shift.
“The shoe never drops in every market at the same time. We’ve built the business around understanding cycles and being willing to pivot when the data tells us to.”
Play the Long Game
For Jace Graham, entrepreneurship is ultimately about durability — and about a kind of vision that only becomes clear in hindsight.
“You don’t connect the dots looking forward. You connect them looking back. When I was an independent landman in northeast Colorado at twenty-five, I had no idea I was building toward a multi-vertical investment platform. But every hard decision, every setback, every pivot was building toward something. People love the idea of overnight success. The truth is, every overnight success I’ve ever met was twenty years in the making. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.”
That long-term mindset traces back generations. Graham points to his great-grandmother, who sold a family dry goods store in Muskogee, Oklahoma, bought a wagon of drill pipe with the proceeds, and moved the family to East Texas at the start of the oil boom. Four generations later, the Graham family is still in the business he started.
“Four generations later, we’re still doing the work. That’s the only legacy worth building.”
Lessons Behind the Legacy
- Four generations of energy expertise shaped Jace Graham’s entrepreneurial journey.
- Rising Phoenix built a multi-vertical platform spanning minerals, royalties, lending, and real estate.
- Consistent, disciplined underwriting remains central to the company’s investment philosophy.
- The company is expanding into AI infrastructure through natural-gas-powered data centers.
- Jace Graham’s long-term mindset focuses on systems, adaptability, and generational wealth creation.
Important Disclosures
This article is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any security. Offers are made only to accredited investors through formal offering documents that contain detailed risk disclosures and material terms.
Past performance is not indicative of future results. Performance figures are unaudited, reflect specific funds during specific periods, and vary by fund and by investor; some funds have performed below targeted ranges. Investments in oil and gas, mineral and royalty interests, and energy infrastructure involve substantial risk, including loss of principal, commodity price volatility, limited liquidity, and depletion of underlying reserves. Forward-looking statements reflect Rising Phoenix’s current expectations and are subject to material risks and uncertainties.
La Plata Peak Fund II is offered under Rule 506(c) of Regulation D; all investors must verify accredited status. La Plata Peak Fund I is offered through registered investment advisor channels via the Schwab platform. Pinnacle Capital Securities, LLC serves as managing broker-dealer for La Plata Peak Fund I.
This article is sponsored content prepared in coordination with the featured company.
