The first deal was small enough to fit in two boys' pockets. Christopher Matarese and Sal Sferlazza were 12, friends from camp, and both wanted the same strategy board game at Toys "R" Us. Neither had enough money. Together, they did. They pooled their cash, bought the game and began making moves on a shared board. It is difficult to ask for a tidier founding myth, except that this one happened roughly 30 years before the company it now seems to explain.
In the four decades since, the board has become considerably more expensive. Matarese and Sferlazza have started companies, sold them, recruited many of the same colleagues again and returned to the table for another round. Their fourth company together is NinjaOne, the IT operations platform that announced a $12.3 billion valuation in June 2026. Nearly 40,000 organizations in more than 140 countries used it by then. The founders still controlled the business.
The usual version of a software story privileges the idea. This story keeps pointing back to the partnership. Sferlazza is the technical, product-driven chief executive. Matarese, a Harvard-trained lawyer, built the legal, financial and operating frame around their ambitions. Their temperamental contrast appears in one of Sferlazza's jokes: he barks; Matarese is "the robot." One supplies voltage, the other circuitry. Neither description is complete, but the machine has kept running.
“It's just like the board games we chipped in for 40 years ago that we couldn't afford to buy.”Christopher Matarese, 2025
The lawyer leaves the law
Matarese studied government and economics at Harvard, then graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. He worked at O'Melveny & Myers from 1998 to 2001, an orderly beginning for a career that would soon wander into video games. Realm Interactive, which he led as president, was the first company he and Sferlazza built together. Korean game publisher NCSoft acquired it in 2004.
The jump from corporate law to game development looks eccentric only from a distance. Law and software both concern systems: rules, permissions, incentives, exceptions and the trouble that arrives when humans meet any of them. Matarese's recurring contribution was not merely to tidy the paperwork after a product existed. He helped give each venture a structure that could hire, sell, finance and eventually transact. An idea may begin on a whiteboard. A company must survive contact with payroll.
More ventures followed. He founded the investment firm Antelope, led Bandera Games, and in 2010 started Anchor, an enterprise file synchronization and sharing service. EFolder acquired Anchor in 2013. Matarese later co-founded interpretation software company Boostlingo, where he served as CFO and a director, and ran LaunchCapital.co. The industries changed. His job kept rhyming: create the scaffolding that lets a technical product become an enduring business.
Realm Interactive turns a friendship into a working founder partnership, then sells to NCSoft.
Matarese builds Anchor, an enterprise file-sync company acquired by eFolder.
Matarese and Sferlazza co-found NinjaRMM, later renamed NinjaOne.
Successive Series C rounds move NinjaOne's reported valuation from $1.9 billion to $5 billion.
A secondary financing values the profitable, debt-free company at $12.3 billion.
Fresh code for a stale corner of IT
NinjaOne began in 2013 as NinjaRMM. The target was a decidedly unglamorous frustration. Managed service providers, which act as outsourced IT departments, had to monitor, patch, secure and repair fleets of devices with tools that felt old, fragmented and awkward. Remote work added laptops, phones, servers and other endpoints to an already untidy estate. Every device became another object to update and another door to defend.
The founders' answer was to build cloud-native software from scratch. Rather than stitch old products together, NinjaOne put monitoring, patching, remote access, backup and automation within a common platform. That clean start mattered. Customers could see their environment through one console, while the company could add products without inheriting decades of technical sediment. Glamour is optional when the patch fails on Friday afternoon. Clarity is not.
The product philosophy came with an equally deliberate service philosophy. The company published its roadmap, sought customer feedback and invested heavily in support. Matarese has said that the durable differentiators were products that improve customers' working lives and the support that helps them succeed. The ambition sounds modest beside a venture-capital pitch. It is also measurable: fewer separate tools, fewer manual workflows, faster responses and less time spent hunting across consoles.
There is another kind of compounding in the company. Some employees have worked with the founders for more than 20 years, following them from startup to startup. Serial entrepreneurship can resemble a traveling repertory company: familiar players, new stage, sharper instincts. Matarese has said that people make the journey, and that building with his best friend is something he never takes for granted. In technology, where co-founder breakups attract the energy of royal scandals, continuity becomes an operating advantage.
The useful luxury of not needing the money
NinjaOne spent its first two years in stealth, launched in 2015 and grew without making fundraising the hero of every chapter. Summit Partners led a $30 million round in 2020. ICONIQ led a $231.5 million Series C in 2024, valuing the company at a reported $1.9 billion. In February 2025, ICONIQ and CapitalG led a $500 million extension at a $5 billion valuation. Part of that capital supported NinjaOne's roughly $250 million acquisition of cloud-backup company Dropsuite.
By the end of 2025, annual recurring revenue had passed $500 million after nearly 70 percent year-over-year growth. The following June, NinjaOne announced more than $400 million in secondary financing at a $12.3 billion valuation. The company said it was profitable and debt-free. Matarese's striking point was that the round was not about keeping the lights on. Plenty of firms wanted in; NinjaOne used the process to choose partners who could help it serve customers.
A valuation accelerates
Reported post-money or transaction valuations. Bars are scaled to the June 2026 figure.
That is the pleasant inversion of finance. A strong time to raise money is when refusal remains available. Matarese and Sferlazza stayed the largest equity holders, with majority control of both the board and voting power. The arrangement gave outside investors exposure to the growth while preserving the founders' authority over the tempo and direction of the business. Control is not automatically wisdom, of course. It is simply the ability to live with one's own mistakes.
“Every decision has to deliver real value to the IT teams and MSPs we serve.”Christopher Matarese, June 2026
Complexity is multiplying again
The problem NinjaOne set out to solve has grown larger. Distributed work spread devices beyond office walls. Cloud software multiplied the services attached to them. AI now promises both new automation and new classes of endpoints, agents and vulnerabilities. Matarese describes fragmentation at scale as IT's hardest problem: organizations assemble dozens of point products to manage, protect, back up and support their equipment, then inherit the cost and risk of the seams between them.
NinjaOne's aspiration is to become the control plane for that environment, bringing more operations into one system while using automation to reduce repetitive work. The phrase sounds grand. The underlying task is almost domestic: know what is in the house, keep it updated, notice when something breaks and make the fix less painful. Good infrastructure disappears into competence. Nobody throws a party because every laptop received its patch.
Matarese remains based in the Los Angeles area while NinjaOne is headquartered in Austin, with large offices in Florida and Berlin and teams around the world. Geography has become another system to manage. So has scale. A company of thousands cannot run on childhood shorthand alone, but its founders still present the partnership as the load-bearing beam: Sferlazza pushes product, Matarese watches the business, and both preserve the customer bargain.
The $12.3 billion figure is the loudest fact in the recent story, yet it may not be the most instructive. Valuations change with markets. Products age. Even good companies eventually meet a year they did not plan for. The more durable achievement is that two people have kept learning how to decide together across games, exits, reinventions and an expanding cast of colleagues. Their first shared purchase required compromise because neither boy had enough. Their latest financing made compromise optional because the company did.
Matarese once called the echo between those moments “fun to see.” That may be the lawyer in him, declining the theatrical conclusion. Still, the shape is hard to resist. Two friends lean over a board. One sees the move; the other checks what it will cost. Then they begin again.