A hockey player from the Iron Range raised $350,000 from hometown investors and built a digital signage company that ran 25,000 screens. Twenty years later, a Vista Equity Partners firm bought it.
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.