founder-led
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The Quiet Firm Turning Bootstrapped Software Into a $7 Billion Bet
Serent Capital has spent 18 years backing founder-led software companies that never chased venture capital. Now it manages more than $7 billion and just closed the largest fund in its history.
The Firm That Bets on Founders Who Never Took a Dime
For 22 years, Mainsail Partners has written checks to software founders who bankrolled their own companies - then handed them an operating team instead of a lecture.
FIGS
FIGS is a direct-to-consumer healthcare apparel brand that reinvented the medical scrub. Founded in 2013 by Heather Hasson and Trina Spear, the Santa Monica company sells comfortable, technical scrubs, lab coats, footwear and lifestyle wear made from its proprietary FIONx fabric, sold almost entirely online to nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals. FIGS reached $631 million in revenue in 2025, serves roughly 2.9 million active customers, and trades on the NYSE under the ticker FIGS after a landmark 2021 IPO.
Sal Sferlazza
Sal Sferlazza is the co-founder and CEO of NinjaOne, the Austin-based IT and endpoint management platform valued at $12.3 billion in June 2026. A serial entrepreneur, he built and sold four previous companies (Realm Interactive, Lasso Logic, PacketTrap, Anchor) before launching what was originally NinjaRMM in 2013 with his childhood-camp friend Chris Matarese. NinjaOne is profitable, debt-free, and still majority-controlled by its founders.