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Vista Equity Partners Built a Factory for Better Software Businesses
Robert F. Smith made one unfashionably narrow bet in 2000: business software deserved its own investment machine. Twenty-five years, $103 billion in assets and more than 650 transactions later, Vista is testing whether that machine can make the leap from SaaS to agentic AI.
Yaakov Zar
Yaakov Zar is the founder and CEO of Lev, a New York company rebuilding how commercial real estate gets financed. He started Lev in 2019 after watching a $4 million loan crawl through six months of email, faxes and paperwork - and decided a $200-billion-a-year industry running on 1990s process deserved better software. Lev began as a tech-enabled brokerage connecting borrowers to nearly 10,000 lenders, raised more than $200 million, then pivoted into an AI-powered CRM and agentic workflow platform for brokers, lenders and sponsors. Before Lev, Zar co-founded Dispatch, a workforce platform sold to Vista Equity Partners in 2018.
Nick Miller
Nick Miller is the founder and CEO of Universe, an Atlanta-based holding company that buys and builds vertical software businesses. He first built Gather, a hospitality SaaS platform for private events that grew from a 200-square-foot closet to a company acquired by Vista Equity Partners and later merged into Tripleseat. With Universe he now owns and operates Goldie, an all-in-one business tool for solopreneurs, and Equilab, a training community for equestrians, applying lessons from one exit to a portfolio of purpose-built software for overlooked markets.