NinjaOne’s new $400-million funding round, which valued the business at $12.3 billion, underscores investor confidence as the profitable, founder-controlled MSP platform expands product development, channel growth, and customer service amid rapid ARR momentum.
MSP platform technology developer NinjaOne recently unveiled the company’s new $400 million funding round which valued the business at $12.3 billion. However, according to company co-founder Christopher Matarese, the round was less about raising needed capital and more about strengthening the company’s long-term position while preserving founder control.
Matarese, the company’s president and CFO, told CRN that NinjaOne was not actively seeking money because the company has been cash-flow positive for more than a year, posted its first profitable quarter in the first calendar quarter, and carries no debt. Instead, he said more than 20 outside investors approached the company, giving NinjaOne the ability to choose backers it believed could help its product, customer service and strategic growth. “We actually weren’t looking to raise money,” Matarese said.
The broader goal, Matarese said, was to add investors who could bring operating expertise, partnership opportunities, and access to leaders at major technology companies while allowing NinjaOne’s founders to retain majority control.
[Related: NinjaOne CEO: ‘Building Our Own IP On A Cloud-First Stack’]
That control matters because NinjaOne’s strategy remains focused on building rather than buying. Matarese contrasted NinjaOne’s unified platform approach with competitors that rely heavily on acquisitions, saying many companies have “Frankensteined” together products “held together by duct tape and a hot glue gun.”
Matarese also framed NinjaOne’s differentiation around product quality, customer service and employee culture. He said the company’s platform helps customers reduce tool sprawl by bringing endpoint management, protection, backup and support into one cloud-native environment. “In short, I’d say we help our customers reduce spend and simplify work,” he said.
MSPs remain NinjaOne’s primary customer focus, but Matarese said growth is also coming from direct customers and traditional channel resellers such as SHI and CDW. He said NinjaOne’s channel business grew 300 percent over the prior year, while the company recently crossed $600 million in annual recurring revenue. Looking ahead, NinjaOne plans to reinvest heavily in product development and customer service, including hiring developers and expanding tools such as real-time vulnerability management.
There’s a lot going on at NinjaOne and the MSP business. To learn more, read CRN’s complete conversation with Matarese which has been lightly edited for clarity.
How do you describe NinjaOne?
At NinjaOne, we believe the hardest problem in IT today is complexity and fragmentation at scale. Most IT companies and organizations are literally stitching together dozens of point solutions just to manage, protect, back up, and support their endpoints, and we think that that fragmentation creates risk, excess cost, more time administering things, and more headaches. NinjaOne solves this challenge by bringing together all IT operations into one unified, cloud-native, AI-powered, modern platform. In short, I’d say we help our customers reduce spend and simplify work.
Your customers are MSPs, correct?
We have MSPs as well as direct customers. MSPs are still our primary focus. Our direct business, frankly, is still mainly driven by MSPs who end up leaving to work in a new company and say, ‘Your tools are terrible. NinjaOne is way better. Can we try NinjaOne?’ So most of our business is word of mouth from former MSPs who’ve gone on to work in companies. They’ve gotten a taste of NinjaOne, and they don’t want to give it up. We think our customers are our best advertising sometimes.
NinjaOne is in a fairly competitive space with companies like Kaseya and ConnectWise, and quite a few others. What is NinjaOne’s primary differentiator? How do you separate yourself from the pack?
When we founded NinjaOne, we basically did it on three tenants which separate us from the pack. The first tenant was to build the absolute best product. We think the best product wins, and I think we’re winning in the market today because we do have the best product. The second thing is to treat customers better than anybody else treats their customers, and that’s something we strive to do. The third thing is treat employees really well, better than you’d want to be treated, because if you treat your employees well, they’re going to help you build the best product, have happy customers, and treat customers well. We’ve done those three things. I think having the best product what we think is the best customer service in the market is a differentiating factor.
Some interesting news out of NinjaOne: The company closed a new round of funding to the tune of $400 million, giving NinjaOne a valuation of $12.3 billion. How did you come up with such a big round of funding?
We actually weren’t looking to raise money. We’ve been very capital efficient since we started the business. My co-founder Sal and I bootstrapped it for many years before we even took on any outside investors. We had our first profitable quarter in Q1. We don’t have any debt. We’ve been cashflow positive for over a year. In Q1, we were GAAP positive. So we actually weren’t looking to raise money. We were really blessed. We had over 20 outside investors who came to us asking to invest, and we thought about it, but we didn’t need the money. If we’re really bringing in more money than we’re spending right now, we use it as an opportunity to curate that list of investors and decide which of them are going to actually help us in our mission of serving our customers. Which investors can we bring on that will help us build a better product, have happier customers, teach us lessons of what they’ve learned. We looked at the potential people that wanted to invest, and curated it down. We probably could have raised $2 [billion] or $3 billion, if we wanted to.
The money we raised, we actually didn’t take into the business. We used it to buy back shares from some of our original investors including high school friends or family that have been in NinjaOne for a long time. I personally invested more of my own money in this round. So my share increased because I really believe in what we’re doing, and think we’ve got a lot of upside. When we took on this investment round and all of our investment rounds, we’ve been in a position to say we’re going to choose who we want to have invest, and we’re going to pick the terms, and we’re going to keep a majority of the company and keep control of the company. So Sal and I have total control of the business and control of the board. As I mentioned, we don’t have any debt, so in raising this money, we didn’t want to be a slave to institutional investors. We didn’t want to be a slave to debt. We want to be a slave to our customers and a slave to building the best product. So being capital efficient throughout and really focused on who we were going to raise money from instead of on maximizing the price or the value, we may have been able to get a higher value. We wanted to maximize bringing on the best investors and keeping control of the business. So we were solving to have complete and total control of the business.
Talk a little bit about the investors and what they bring to NinjaOne besides money.
We have a number of investors. Iconiq is one that has been in the company for a while. Others include Google’s investment arm CapitalG, Wellington Management, Ontario Teachers, and BDT & MSD Partners, which is a combination of Byron Trott’s and Michael Dell’s funds. Having partners like Michael Dell as an investor gives us opportunities to see if there are things we can do with Dell to better add value. Having large businesses like Iconiq, who backed Datadog, Snowflake, and Anthropic, give us access to things that Anthropic may be doing as well as access to founders and leaders at companies like Datadog and Snowflake that have done things we can learn lessons from. We’ve spoken to many of the top founders at some of the biggest and most successful public companies through our investors. Talking to CEOs or presidents of these gigantic companies really teaches us a lot. They tell us some of the mistakes they made and give us advice, and we try to learn. These discussions also provide access to partnerships. Google has helped us with a number of things throughout the investment process including security and how can we be safer as a business and better serve our customers. What customer service lessons have they learned? These were the things we were looking for.
You said NinjaOne is GAAP profitable as of the first calendar quarter of this year. So what do you plan to do with the new money that you said you don’t really need?
Reinvest it into the business. We’re still in a period of hyper growth. We’re hiring as many developers as we possibly can to make the product better. We’ve got the best customer service in the market. We have an over 98 percent CSAT (customer satisfaction) score, but we want to invest more there. I think we spent three times what our competitors do on customer service, and we want to keep spending there to continue providing the best customer service in the market. But primarily, we’re a product-first company. Building the best possible product and as many different products as we can to help serve our customers, help our customers be more efficient, is the goal, and using the money we have to reinvest into the business is the primary goal. We’re literally hiring as many developers as fast as we can while still making sure we maintain quality and supervision over those developers. Unfortunately, you can’t just hire 1,000 developers at once, or we would. But we’re hiring at a pace that is as fast as we can while making sure we keep control.
Do acquisitions play into future plans for NinjaOne?
They’re not in our plans. We’ve only made one acquisition in our history, and that was a company that we partnered with for a long time, Dropsuite. We made sure their stack was consistent with ours, that we could bring them in and still have one unified platform, one stack and code. We see many companies that have really ‘Frankensteined’ together a product with 25 acquisitions that’s held together by duct tape and a hot glue gun, and just doesn’t work as well. From the beginning, we have taken the approach of wanting to be builders. We want to have one single stack, one pane of glass, everything integrated. You press a button and it just works quickly. This gives us agility, because with one stack of code we can do things that companies that have brought together 20 different acquisitions can’t do.
Of course, if the right product that our customers really want comes up that we feel we couldn’t build, then acquisitions are always possible, but we’ve taken the view at NinjaOne that we want to build the best business. We don’t want to take shortcuts. And I think a lot of times doing an acquisition is just taking a shortcut as opposed to building it yourself. If you didn’t take that shortcut, maybe three years down the line when you build it yourself, you’re going to have a much better product that’s fully integrated. In the short run, the shortcut is great, but we’re looking to give our customers long-term value as well as short-term value.
In NinjaOne’s stack of offerings to its MSP customers, are the technologies primarily developed by NinjaOne, or do you do a lot of work integrating technologies from other vendors?
Most of NinjaOne’s platform is products developed by NinjaOne. We do integration for products we don’t offer. We have no intention of getting into the security EDR (endpoint detection and response) market, so that’s something where we integrate with a number of security vendors. But for the most part we try to use technology that we’ve built from the ground up on one stack.
So for data protection, where NinjaOne has its own technology, would you be open to working with other data protection vendors, or do you prefer your customers focus on your own technology, as one example.
We want our customers to be happy. So we’re always open to trying to work with our customers to integrate the tools they have. We’d like to convince them that ours are better, but if they’re tied to something, we want to integrate it and make it work for them if we can.
Do you envision any other funding rounds in the future?
We don’t envision anything happening anytime soon. We didn’t envision this funding round happening, frankly. It was more, as I mentioned, people coming to us and having an opportunity that made sense. But obviously, if there is some great company we want to acquire, or something else happens over the horizon. … It’s hard to know what’s going to happen, but right now we’re not looking to do anything anytime soon.
As you look at the rest of 2026, what are some of your strategic priorities?
For us, everything comes back to the product. So trying to improve the product, trying to improve our customer service. We’re releasing a number of products. We’ve recently released a vulnerability management tool that is really getting great reviews. It is real-time vulnerability scanning. A lot of the vulnerability products in the market are heavy products that require a lot of resources, and they scan once a week, or once every two weeks, because people don’t want to use the resources or time. It’s kind of like tape backup was 20 years ago, where you put a tape in and you hope you don’t have a problem for the week until you change the tape. But our vulnerability scanner is scanning real time, and the great part is if it does detect a problem, then you’re in one fully integrated pane of glass where you can patch and fix the problem, fix the vulnerability. So we’re seeing a lot of positive reviews there. We have a number of other products on our roadmap coming out, so I think it’s just continuing to give our customers more tools to make their lives easier and to make our platform more valuable to them.
Going forward, do you see most of your growth coming from your MSP partners or from the direct side?
I think we see growth from everywhere. We’re most focused on our MSP customers, but we see a ton of growth in our direct customers. We see a ton of growth in our channel motion. When I say channel, we have our MSP channel, but we also have typical channel resellers like SHI and CDW where we’re seeing a tremendous amount of growth. I think our channel grew 300 percent over the prior year, so we’re seeing growth everywhere. I’d say we’re still in a real hyper growth state space. The nice part is our product is the same product regardless of who we sell to. We’re really less worried about who we sell to and more worried about building the absolute best product that every business in the world wants to use.
NinjaOne is a private company, but can you talk a little bit about the company’s financials?
We just crossed $600 million of ARR or annual recuring revenue. We’re growing at over 60 percent. And we have, I think, right now over 40,000 customers and many more end users because most of those customers are MSPs that each have 50 to 200 businesses.
