A holding company for the software no one fights over
Nick Miller spends his days hunting for software businesses that venture capital walks past. Equestrian training logs. Appointment books for hairstylists and tattoo artists working alone. The unglamorous tools that run small, specific worlds. His company, Universe Software, exists to buy and build exactly these - what he calls a modern holding company of vertical software businesses.
The pitch is plain: own the software customers already live inside, then deploy capital and infrastructure so those purpose-built products keep getting better. No moonshots. No promises to reinvent an industry. Just durable tools for narrow markets, compounding quietly. It is a contrarian thing to find exciting in a world that worships unicorns, and that is rather the point.
The closet years
Before he was an acquirer, he was the founder sweating payroll. In 2012 Miller co-founded Gather with Alex Lassiter and Tom Merrihew. Three people, one room - a 200-square-foot closet. They had noticed something hiding in plain sight: private events can drive 10 to 40 percent of a full-service restaurant's revenue, and almost everyone managed them with paper, spreadsheets, and crossed fingers.
Gather turned that mess into software. Booking, planning, managing, executing - one platform for the whole private-events program. The closet became fifteen employees in under two years. The product spread to roughly a thousand restaurants and venues. By the time the company sold majority control to Vista Equity Partners in 2017, it was on track to top a billion dollars in reservations booked across about 3,500 venues. Vista later merged it into Tripleseat, where the technology lives on.
From selling to buying
An exit teaches you how to sell a company. Miller decided to use the lesson in reverse. In 2021 he founded Universe and became its CEO, co-founding the venture with seed investor Eric Stromberg, who stays on as advisor. The same year he co-founded and invested in Recess. By 2022 he had stepped in as CEO of Goldie, one of Universe's businesses.
The portfolio reads like a deliberate refusal of the obvious. Goldie is all-in-one business management for solopreneurs - the one-person beauty, wellness, and lifestyle operators who are too small for enterprise tools and too serious for a notebook. Equilab is a training and performance community for equestrians, billed as one of the largest of its kind in the world. Different worlds, same thesis: a specific market, a tool built only for it, room to grow.
Philosophy, then payroll
The route here was not a straight line through computer science. Miller studied Philosophy and Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then did graduate philosophy work at the University of Oxford. He started his career as a Senior Associate at Bain & Company in 2009 before the founder's itch took over. It is an unusual spine for a software operator - argument, evidence, and the patient habit of asking what a thing is actually for.
That habit shows up in the work. Universe is not trying to be everywhere. It is trying to be exactly somewhere, on purpose, for people who would otherwise be ignored. Build the closet. Sell the company. Then go find the next overlooked room and do it again - this time with a checkbook.