The oddity of Sal Sferlazza is that he keeps building companies for a category of buyer - the managed service provider - and then selling those companies to somebody else, and then noticing that the buyers he used to sell to are still complaining about the same product problem, and then starting another company to fix it. He has done this five times. The fifth one, NinjaOne, he has decided not to sell.
NinjaOne is currently valued at $12.3 billion. That number was set in June 2026 by a secondary share sale of just over $400 million, in which existing shareholders and employees sold a slice of their stock to a syndicate that included Sequoia Capital, ICONIQ, CapitalG, Wellington Management, and the Ontario Teachers' Venture Growth arm, among others. The company itself is profitable. It has no debt. Sferlazza and his co-founder, Chris Matarese, still hold majority control of the board.
This is unusual. Software companies at this scale typically have (a) done an IPO, (b) accepted a strategic acquirer, or (c) been through a leveraged recapitalization that leaves the founders diluted and slightly angrier than they were. NinjaOne has done none of these things. The public-market question comes up in every interview Sferlazza gives, and he answers it, roughly, by saying that going public is not on the immediate horizon. The polite reading is that the company has enough cash and enough growth that it doesn't need the money. The impolite reading is the same.
The camp friend
Sferlazza met Chris Matarese at summer camp when they were both twelve. According to a Fortune profile of NinjaOne's 2025 funding round, the two of them pooled their pocket money to buy a strategy board game they'd spotted at Toys "R" Us. This is now cited so often it should probably come with a footnote, but it is also true, and it is the origin story of a business partnership that has produced five companies over three decades.
The first was Realm Interactive, founded in 2001. Realm made a game called Exarch that was pitched as a spiritual sequel to Trade Wars, the classic 1980s space-trading BBS game. NCSoft acquired Realm in 2004 and released the resulting title as Dungeon Runners, with cover art by the Marvel illustrator Joe Madureira. This is a specific fact that has almost nothing to do with IT management software, and it is included here because it is impossible to write about Sferlazza without mentioning that his career as a serial B2B founder began with an MMORPG that shipped with comic-book art.
Between the game studio and NinjaOne there were three more companies. Lasso Logic pioneered continuous data protection for small businesses and was acquired by SonicWall in 2005. PacketTrap did network management and was acquired by Quest Software in 2009. Anchor Networks did enterprise file synchronization and was acquired by eFolder in 2013. In each case the buyer was upstream of the same customer segment - managed service providers, the small IT firms that manage other small firms' computers - and in each case Sferlazza took his check, took a breath, and started listening to those same MSPs again.
The saturated market
In 2013 Sferlazza and Matarese started NinjaRMM in San Francisco. The remote monitoring and management category - RMM, in the industry shorthand - already had eleven or twelve entrenched competitors. Kaseya was there. ConnectWise was there. SolarWinds N-central was there. Datto was there. Nobody, and this is a direct paraphrase of what analysts said at the time, was asking for another one.
Sferlazza launched anyway, and then throttled growth. This is the part of the story that founders find least believable. Early NinjaOne was slower than it needed to be, on purpose, because Sferlazza had spent enough time selling to MSPs to know that they will forgive a lot of things but they will not forgive support that stops answering the phone. "It takes years to build trust with customers," he has said, "and a day to lose it." The company grew, and kept growing, and the market accidentally consolidated around it.
NinjaOne valuation, private rounds
Product-led, apparently, means something
Ask Sferlazza to describe how he runs the company and he tends to reach for a phrase - product-led - that has been so thoroughly hollowed out by B2B marketing that it now functions as filler in most CEO interviews. In his usage it seems to mean something specific. "As a product-led CEO," he has told Category Visionaries, "I just feel like when the product's ready, people will buy, the money will follow." He also says, of company culture, that his job is "inviting your staff to participate in that journey, versus being the CEO that comes down from the mountain and says, 'This is the Bible or the vision of how the company is going to be.'"
The mountain-and-Bible line is worth pausing on. NinjaOne has 2,000 employees. It sells into an industry - IT operations - populated largely by veterans of Kaseya, SolarWinds, and ConnectWise, three companies whose reputations for top-down management are, let us say, robust. The alternative Sferlazza describes is not particularly novel, but the fact that a $12.3-billion company still frames its internal decisions this way is, if nothing else, on-brand for a firm that started as a game studio.
The Dropsuite move
In early 2025 NinjaOne closed a $500 million Series C extension at a $5 billion valuation, led by ICONIQ Growth and Alphabet's CapitalG. Most of the money went, in a somewhat unusual maneuver for a private company at that stage, to funding an acquisition. NinjaOne bought Dropsuite, a publicly traded Australian backup and data protection provider, for roughly $250 million. The strategic logic was that endpoint management is a natural distribution channel for cloud backup, and vice versa. The tactical logic was that a founder who had already sold a backup company (Lasso Logic) and a file-sync company (Anchor) probably had opinions about what "good" looks like in the category.
What five words
Asked by the entrepreneur and investor Jyoti Bansal to summarize leadership in five words, Sferlazza said: "The only constant is change." He has scaled a company from zero to $12.3 billion; the phrase is not doing a lot of work here. But there is a version of Sferlazza's career that reads as a series of adjustments to a single underlying market - IT service providers - as the industry changed underneath him. Video games became data protection became network management became file sync became endpoint management became autonomous endpoint management. He has, in the aggregate, been paying attention to one customer.
Where he lives now
NinjaOne moved from San Francisco to Austin in 2021, part of the broader tech relocation that made 301 Congress Avenue a fashionable address for enterprise software. The company hired aggressively through the 2022 downturn, when many of its competitors were cutting, and the resulting balance sheet - profitable, cash-generative, with more than a billion dollars of venture financing in the bank - is the kind of thing that lets a founder answer the IPO question with a shrug. Sferlazza continues to shrug at it, articulately, in podcasts.