NinjaOne, an endpoint security startup that moved its headquarters to Austin a few years ago, has raised a $231.5 million investment to help fuel its growth — a massive amount that's among the largest funding rounds ever raised by an Austin-based company.
The series C round was led by Iconiq Growth, the tech investment arm of San Francisco-based Iconiq Capital. The new minority investment valued the company at $1.9 billion.
Other investors in the round include Frank Slootman, chairman and CEO of Snowflake, and Amit Agarwal, president of Datadog. As part of the deal, Iconiq Growth General Partner Roy Luo has joined NinjaOne’s board of directors.
NinjaOne, formerly known as NinjaRMM, was founded by CEO Sal Sferlazza and CFO Chris Matarese in San Francisco in 2013. It raised a $30 million funding round in 2020 led by Boston-based investment firm Summit Partners. In 2021, Sferlazza and several other executives quietly moved to Austin and later announced the company had relocated its corporate headquarters to the city. To date, it has raised $282.7 million.
The startup, which automates security for devices, such as laptops and smart phones used by company employees, has more than 17,000 customers. That includes household names such as Nissan, Pabst Brewing Co. and Nvidia.
NinjaOne has about 1,100 employees across its offices in Austin, Tampa Bay and Berlin. About 300 of them are based in Austin, where the company has its roughly 40,000-square-foot headquarters at 301 Congress Ave., Matarese said.
The company plans to hire about 400 additional employees in coming months, and roughly 100 of them likely will be in Austin. While the company doesn't have any imminent plans to expand or move into a new space, Matarese said it probably will look at expanding or leasing a new space in the near future.
NinjaOne currently has nearly 50 open positions listed on its careers page, including more than 20 roles in its Austin office.
Matarese said NinjaOne's workforce is one of its most important attributes. He said the company teaches new employees that customers come first in a very intentional way, and the company tries to provide its employees with the best work environment and company culture in the industry.
"There's that old adage, 'the customer's always right,'" he said. "And while that isn't true 100% of the time, we try to make sure that it's true most of the time, and that we treat them as such. Everybody has had experiences where they're frustrated ... we tell our employees, 'when you're dealing with customers, imagine you're the customer.'"
Matarese said that NinjaOne hadn't been seeking new venture capital funding. But a bunch of offers started flowing in over the past year or so.
"We were pretty lucky," he said. "We had a lot of inbound coming from growth equity firms that had heard about the business. I think a lot of these firms do their own customer surveys, and we had been scoring really highly in all of the NPS (net promoter score) surveys and customer surveys. One of the firms said that we had the best NPS score, compared to competitors, that they'd ever seen. So we were really fortunate to have a bunch of investors coming in. For us, it was just picking the right one."
The company had offers from firms that gave NinjaOne an even higher valuation than the $1.9 billion it ended up with. But Matarese and Sferlazza wanted to stay in complete control of the company. They went forward with Iconiq because of its history in funding successful SaaS companies such as Datadog, Snowflake Inc. and CrowdStrike.
"And they thought that we had the potential to be a generational company," he said.
Matarese said that the new funding round catapulted NinjaOne to over a billion-dollar valuation for the first time. The company declined to share revenue figures.
NinjaOne's $231.5 million funding round isn't the largest ever raised by an Austin startup. But it's close. In 2022, The Boring Co., owned by Elon Musk and headquartered in Pflugerville, raised $675 million at a nearly $5.7 billion valuation. Also in 2022, Austin-based energy industry labor marketplace Workrise raised a $300 million series E round at a $2.9 billion valuation.
For now, NinjaOne plans to remain hyper-focused on customer service and product development. Matarese said he doesn't see the company being acquired, though it may make acquisitions of its own. The more likely path would be an IPO, though the company isn't really thinking about that right now, either.
"Probably in a year or two, we're going to have to start thinking about it, but it's not something we're even really thinking about right now," he said.
