11 years after its birth, NinjaOne announced that he had obtained a $231.5 million Series C funding roundreaching a market value of 1.9 billion dollars. Usually, Type C financing occurs after the initial phase of early stage and the subsequent one of consolidation of a startup. It therefore serves to accelerate the market climb of a company that has already demonstrated sustained and constant growth. In the case of the company whose eponymous platform automates endpoint management, it is the current 17 thousand customers who attest to its undisputed growth, which culminated last year in an ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) of more than 70%.
Originally founded in 2013 by the CEO Sal Sferlazza and the president and CFO Chris Matareseover the years it has become a reference partner for MSP (Managed Service Provider) struggling with legacy solutions RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management). Its expansion has led it to manage more than 7 million endpoints over the years for the benefit of MSPs and IT teams, with customers in over 80 countries including Nissan, Nvidia, State of California and University of Oxford.
NinjaOne and ICONIQ Growth, the reason for the partnership
Leading the round, ICONIQ Growth, a global fund made up of “entrepreneurs who support other entrepreneurs”, to use the company’s own self-definition. Over the course of his business, he has made significant investments in some of the world‘s largest technology companies. Just to mention the best known to the general public, we can remember the names of AirBnB, Alibaba, Gitlab, Uber and Zoom. Following the financing, Roy Luo, General Partner of ICONIQ Growth, has joined the board of directors of NinjaOne: “Under the exceptional leadership of Sal and Chris – said Luo – NinjaOne has demonstrated impressive speed in product development, which has led to an increase in market share, geographic expansion and customer growth. We are excited to support their dynamic energy, relentless commitment to customer success and continued growth trajectory through our global platform.”
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“ICONIQ Growth’s investment in NinjaOne – added Sal Sferlazza – has been used to increase the success of our customers. We are quadrupling our customer support efforts, investing heavily in platform and product innovation to solve and automate more use cases, ensuring the company can scale to meet our customers’ needs.” The CEO is convinced that the period is particularly favorable for the business on which NinjaOne focuses.
Endpoint monitoring, a growing business
Sferlazza’s words are also supported by studies such as that of Enterprise Strategy Group which, in attesting to the massive use of endpoints among employees, also highlight the inability of companies to actively monitor them. “We are in the decade of the endpoint – underlined the founder of NinjaOne -, fueled by a wave of workers pushed to work remotely or with hybrid models during and after the pandemic. Whether you’re an MSP responsible for managing and protecting other people’s businesses or a CIO in charge of an enterprise, endpoints represent a significant risk and opportunity. We are excited and honored to partner with ICONIQ Growth to fuel our customers’ success.”
In addition to ICONIQ Growth, other investors such as Frank Slootmanpresident and CEO of Snowflakee Amit Agarwalpresident of Datadog, who said: “Endpoint management has always been a complex challenge for IT teams. With recent trends in hybrid work and the increase in cybersecurity needs of personal mobile devices, the issue continues to grow exponentially in complexity and size. Sal and the NinjaOne team have a deep understanding of the problem and have built an innovative solution that solves many of these problems for IT teams. This is why I am thrilled to participate as an investor.” The reference is to the platform which lends itself to covering a wide range of use cases ranging from endpoint management to RMM software, up to patch management and backup for multi-tenant MSPs.