Private equity firm Summit Partners has invested in NinjaRMM, and taken a minority stake in the RMM (remote monitoring and management) software provider to MSPs and IT departments.
The funding round involves $30 million in growth equity led by Summit Partners, bringing total funding to date to $36 million, ChannelE2E has confirmed.
To be clear: NinjaRMM has not been acquired. The funding allows the company to scale R&D and other efforts, and also ensures NinjaRMM founder and CEO Sal Sferlazza retains control of the software firm's business destiny, the company says.
Without knocking rivals, the statement appears to differentiate NinjaRMM from multiple MSP-focused software and technology providers that are now majority owned by such private equity firms as:
- Insight Partners (Kaseya);
- Thoma Bravo (Barracuda and ConnectWise);
- and Vista Equity Partners (Datto).
Thoma Bravo also owns a stake in SolarWinds, but I don't know if it's a majority or minority position. That software company's stock is also publicly traded.
NinjaRMM: Growth Ahead of Funding
The funding arrives amid rapid growth at NinjaRMM, which CEO Sal Sferlazza outlined in this ChannelE2E interview. Among the growth milestones:
- NinjaRMM now supports more than 4,000 MSPs and customers, up from 3,000 in mid-2019 and 2,000 in September 2018.
- A march toward 200 employees later this year -- including many new hires in engineering -- up from a current headcount of 160 employees, and around 40 employees in 2018.
- In 2019, the company grew its engineering department by 60 percent, and more hires are on the way.
NinjaRMM, founded in 2013 and built by a team of MSP industry veterans, has focused on a pure cloud model since day one and therefore claims to scale more efficiently than RMM industry platforms that were born a decade or so earlier.
Summit Partners: MSP Software and Remote Monitoring Experience
Summit Partners has extensive experience in and around the remote monitoring and MSP software markets. The private equity firm's key investments include:
- 2011: Summit Partners acquired software, technology and NOC (network operations center) assets that became Continuum Managed Services. Thoma Bravo then acquired Continuum in 2017, and merged the business into ConnectWise in 2019.
- 2017: Summit Partners acquired Jamf, the Apple device management software specialist.
- 2019: Summit Partners invested in Red Canary, an MSSP and MDR (managed detection and response) solutions provider.
Summit Partners' additional portfolio companies include/have included A10 Networks (application delivery networking systems), A Cloud Guru (online cloud training), Odoo (all-in-one business software), and Zenoss (IT infrastructure management).
Summit Partners Invests in NinjaRMM: Executive Perspectives
In a prepared statement about Summit's investment in NinjaRMM, Sferlazza said:
“Summit’s financing will enable us to move even faster, deliver more value to our customers and accelerate market leadership. We are excited to partner with Summit who has a wealth of experience advising highly successful companies, while giving us the flexibility to operate as an independent organization. We’ve always strived to deliver a product that continuously exceeds expectations, and as the largest independent RMM solution on the market, we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished in such a short amount of time.”
Andrew Collins, a managing director at Summit Partners and member of the NinjaRMM board of directors, added:
“NinjaRMM is focused on disrupting the status quo by bringing better products and better service to highly skilled IT professionals. The company’s powerful, intuitive platform is backed by incredible customer support and takes a fresh, innovative approach to remote monitoring and endpoint management. We believe that the MSP and IT software market has been underserved for years, and we are proud to support Ninja’s continued expansion in the sector.”
So what's next for NinjaRMM? Poke around ChannelE2E's interview with CEO Sal Sferlazza for more clues.
