Sal Sferlazza and Christopher Matarese first got into business together when they were 12-year-old camp friends, pooling their cash to buy a strategy-based board game they both had their eyes on at Toys “R” Us.
Forty years later, their ambitions have grown. Sferlazza and Matarese’s IT management platform, NinjaOne, is announcing $500 million in fresh funding led by Iconiq Growth and CapitalG at a whopping $5 billion valuation, Fortune can exclusively report. The company was last valued at $1.9 billion in its February 2024 Series C.
Today, Sferlazza and Matarese still act like childhood friends, butting in to finish each other’s sentences and disagreeing about whether they ever get into fights (“I definitely bark a lot, but he’s the robot,” Sferlazza jokes). But in the sharp-elbowed world of tech startups, where cofounder rifts are as common as ChatGPT wrappers, Sferlazza and Matarese’s decades-long relationship has helped them upend the competitive IT sector—and attract two of the top growth investors.
Sferlazza, a serial entrepreneur who has started seven companies, and Matarese, a Harvard-trained lawyer, began collaborating on startups in the early 2000s, first working together on a video game company that sold to a Korean publisher in 2004. Sferlazza would serve as the brains behind the product, while Matarese would provide the financial and legal infrastructure. NinjaOne is their fourth company together.
Sferlazza got the idea for NinjaOne after he stumbled into the world of managed service providers, or MSPs—the companies that many small businesses rely on as their outsourced IT departments. He was developing products to sell to MSPs, like backup recovery tools, and realized that most of the offerings looked like they were built 20 years ago. “My customers through [my] last three startups were feeling horrible pain,” he said.
At the core was a problem called “endpoint sprawl,” or more simply, the fact that the number of devices used by employees was accelerating, from point-of-sale systems to Internet of Things hardware. IT administrators have to manage all of these, whether installing updates to software, addressing security breaches, or finding missing files. Sferlazza and Matarese created NinjaOne as the platform to manage the whole spread, soon realizing that not only MSPs but in-house IT departments found the technology useful as well. NinjaOne’s customers now include Nvidia, Lyft, and Porsche.
Endpoint management wasn’t a green space. Everyone from Microsoft to Kaseya was operating in the sector, but NinjaOne had an advantage as a cloud-native solution building new products based on evolving customer needs. Derek Zanutto—a general partner at CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent investment fund—became interested in endpoint management after working with CrowdStrike, one of the firm’s top investments. Before he found NinjaOne, Zanutto looked at more than 30 companies in the space, but he felt all their technology was stale and their customers were unhappy.
“They’re taking leftovers from the fridge and trying to reheat those, chop them up, and create some frittata,” he told me. “The Ninja team went to the grocery store with a shopping list of all fresh ingredients to make what they wanted to make.”
He described NinjaOne as an “automated pit crew” for IT teams to be able to stress test and tune up every device across their networks. “We very much believe Ninja can be the next CrowdStrike—the next generational company of that size and scale,” Zanutto said.
While CapitalG is a new investor, Iconiq Growth previously led NinjaOne’s Series C. Roy Luo, a general partner at Iconiq, said the bulk of the extension round will go to funding NinjaOne’s roughly $250 million acquisition of Dropsuite, a backup and data protection company. The acquisition is part of a broader strategy by NinjaOne to broaden its product suite, putting it into a similar category as other IT leaders like Datadog and ServiceNow. “NinjaOne is a business that has really broad potential and aspirations to be transformational in the IT arena,” Luo said.
With a new valuation of $5 billion and 1,500 employees, the under-the-radar company will start to enter conversations as an IPO candidate, though Luo, along with Sferlazza and Matarese, said going public is not on the immediate horizon. For now, the two friends are focused on growing the business.
“It’s just like the board games we chipped in for [40] years ago that we couldn’t afford to buy,” said Matarese. “Now we’re making strategic moves with the company and trying to do what’s best for the business, the employees, and the customers. So it’s fun to see it come full circle.”
Leo Schwartz
X:@leomschwartz
Email: leo.schwartz@fortune.com
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VENTURE DEALS
- RAD Security, a San Francisco-based cloud infrastructure security provider, raised $14 million in Series A funding. CheyenneVentures led the round and was joined by Forgepoint Capital, Lytical Ventures, Akamai, and existing investors .406 Ventures, Vertex Ventures, and Gula Tech Adventures.
- Kapta Space, a Seattle-based spaceborne radar technology developer, raised $5 million in seed funding. MetaVC Partners led the round and was joined by Entrada Ventures and Blue Collective.
- Musubi, a Santa Barbara-based AI-powered content moderation platform, raised $5 million in seed funding. J2 Ventures led the round and was joined by Shakti Ventures, Mozilla Ventures, and existing investor J Ventures.
- Behavix, a Helsinki-based behavioral data company, raised $2.5 million in seed funding. Vendep Capital and Superhero Capital led the round and were joined by angel investors and others.
- WilsonAI, a Dover, Del.-based AI legal assistant, raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding. Nomad Ventures led the round and was joined by Autopilot Ventures, Entrepreneur First, Transpose, angel investors.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- Cosette Pharmaceuticals, backed by Avista Capital Partners and Hamilton Lane, agreed to acquire Mayne Pharma, a Salisbury South, Australia-based specialty pharmaceutical company, for approximately $430 million.
OTHER
- Celsius agreed to acquire Alani Nutrition, a Louisville-based energy drinks and snacks brand, for $1.8 billion, at a net purchase price of $1.65 billion in cash and stock and $150 million in tax assets.
IPOS
- AIRO Group Holdings, an Albuquerque-based aerospace and defense technology company, filed to go public on the Nasdaq. The company posted $87 million in revenue for the year ending Dec. 31, 2024. New Generation Aerospace, Carter Aviation Technologies, and Brian Haynes back the company.
PEOPLE
- Ibex Investors, a Denver-based venture capital firm, added Adi Dangot Zukovsky as a partner. Previously, she was at 10D.
