A private-equity investor flush with $11.5 billion of new funding wants to buy software companies for Nashville tech entrepreneur Matt DiMaria to run and expand.
That is the concept and horsepower propelling Nashville-based Stelao LLC, a venture that DiMaria and his financial backers announced first to the Business Journal on Wednesday.
The new business has the potential to add depth and sophistication to the software realm of Nashville's growing technology scene. Stelao pairs DiMaria and other former executives of another locally based software company with Chicago-based investor GTCR LLC, a 43-year-old company with more than $35 billion of assets under management across several industries.
"We will build and operate high-growth software companies," DiMaria said in an interview. "The market opportunity is enormous. Make no doubt about it: We're kicking it in gear. This isn't a cold start. The engine is already running."
DiMaria will lead Stelao as CEO (derived from the Latin word for "stars") alongside four of his former executive colleagues from Mindful, a Brentwood-based software company. DiMaria is a Silicon Valley ex-pat, following his son to Nashville and bringing the head office of Mindful with him in 2018 when the company's then-owner named him CEO. Under DiMaria, Mindful more than doubled annual revenue for three years in a row. The company sold last year.
DiMaria just publicly resurfaced in the business community this month as a founding director of The Innovation Studio, a separate business that is aiming to grow high-tech startups. Stelao is different — and kind of like DiMaria's experience with Mindful, in which an investor acquired a company and put him in charge.
Two of the other four Mindful-to-Stelao executives are in Nashville: Kurt Nelson and Adam Ragauskis. Chris Loeper is in Austin, and Daniel Bohannon is in the San Francisco Bay Area. They're already weighing their first acquisition, backed by GTCR, which last month closed its largest-ever funding round.
"In more than half of our deals, we find what we believe are the best talents in any particular industry we're working in and then go find businesses and assets for those leaders to build and transform," GTCR co-CEO Dean Mihas told Reuters in a May interview.
DiMaria described Stelao's focus as software platforms used by big brands and large enterprise companies, in which that technology plays a key role in how those companies reach and serve consumers.
"There's a massive disruption going on that's largely been accelerated by AI. The volume of data is increasing exponentially," DiMaria said. "The amount of data coming into and passing through information systems is blowing up. It's becoming overwhelming for businesses. Businesses will succeed or fall behind largely based on how they absorb this evolution. This isn't 'upgrade one system and everything will be OK.' It will take time."
