- NinjaOne provides endpoint management and Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software which allows IT professionals to track any internet-connected device, with backup management included as well.
- NinjaOne was founded in 2014 by Sal Sferlazza and Chris Materese in the San Francisco Bay area as NinjaRMM. The company was founded primarily with funding from two ambitious founders who sold successful startups and exited four of them.
- The founders had different career beginnings, but now work together leading one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the IT management space. The key to NinjaOne’s success is Sal and Chris’ extensive technological expertise, industry experience, and unwavering commitment to organic product development without compromising on quality and customer experience.
NinjaOne, founded in 2014, is a company that provides IT departments and managed service providers with endpoint management and security solutions. The two founders, Sal Sferlazza and Chris Materese, built the platform on the cloud, offering a delightful, easy and efficient user experience.
NinjaOne, a powerful remote management tool
NinjaOne provides endpoint management and Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software which allows IT professionals to track any internet-connected device, with backup management included as well.
NinjaOne platform can be seen as a powerful remote management tool, just like Teams and Zoho. With flexible remote access options, including remote control, file transfer and device management, it helps users remotely manage multiple computers, servers and mobile devices for efficient management and maintenance.
Software patching was added in 2017 through a partnership with Ivanti and a ticketing solution was introduced in 2021 to allow ticketing for issues for individual devices on the network.
In 2024, NinjaOne and SentinelOne, an cybersecurity AI platform for entreprises, launched a partnership to offer a new integrated solution to improve endpoint security by combining IT operations with cybersecurity functions. This new deployment offers one-click threat visibility and response, and immediate threat alerting via multiple communication channels.
“The mantra for us at Ninja is now pretty clear: Build it as big as we can build it,” said Sal Sferlazza, CEO and co-founder of NinjaOne.
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Rapid expansion during the pandemic
NinjaOne was founded in 2014 by Sal Sferlazza and Chris Materese in the San Francisco Bay area as NinjaRMM. The current name NinjaOne was rebranded in 2021. The company was founded primarily with funding from two ambitious founders who sold successful startups and exited four of them.
The company expanded rapidly due to demand from the COVID-19 pandemic and opened an office in Clearwater, Florida in 2020 after receiving a $30M investment round from VCS that included Summit Partners.
With the Austin expansion, the company had offices in Austin, Tampa, and Berlin and announced it was looking to expand into the Asia Pacific markets and set up an office in Sydney in 2020.
This ultimately led to the expansion of the Sydney office and the adoption of NinjaOne by several areas of the Philippines government, including the Office of the General Counsel and the Department of Energy.
NinjaRMM has signed up more than 5,000 clients, raised $30 million in equity from Summit Partners in 2020 and has nearly 300 employees by 2023, up from just 40 in 2018. In January 2024, the company announced it had completed a Series C financing round of $231.5M at a $1.9B valuation with ICONIQ Growth leading the round.
“Ninja will be my most successful startup by a mile the way it’s going, I say humbly, and we’re all super excited about that,” Sal said in an interview with The Org. “As a startup, RMM is quite an ambitious endeavour but has a lot more functionality than the other products that I’ve built.
Sferlazza and Matarese, pioneering a new era of endpoint management
Sal Sferlazza is CEO and Co-Founder of NinjaOne, holding a bachelor’s degree in computer science and finance from the University of Albany, SUNY. Sal’s career has been dedicated to taking powerful novel technologies and applying them to use cases where customers are having difficulty.
Chris Matarese is the President, CFO, and Co-Founder of NinjaOne. He holds a bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard University and in the top 2% of his class, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, magna cum laude.
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Sferlazza and Matarese have together created, built, and exited several highly successful businesses with technology visionary before he founded NinjaOne, including Realm Interactive, a video gaming company that was acquired by NCSoft in 2004, and Anchor, an enterprise file synchronisation and share service that was acquired by eFolder in 2013. Most recently, Sferlazza served as the co-founder and board member of Boostlingo, a language interpretation technology company while Matarese was the co-founder, Director, and CFO.
Sferlazza alone has been working since 1996, starting from Accenture, a global professional services company, as a software consultant. He set up Lasso Logic, a data-protection company that was acquired by SonicWall in 2005 and PacketTrap, a network management company that was acquired by Quest Software in 2009. Now, he serves on the Board of Directors at RallyUp.com, an online fundraising platform.
Matarese was an attorney with O’Melveny & Myers from 1998 to 2001. The two men had different career beginnings but now work together leading one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the IT management space.
At NinjaRMM, the concrete foundation turned out to be building on a new stack. They had made a lot of connections and customers in the MSP space and realised most of those customers were having IT capability issues. The company took those pain points and built Ninja on the cloud, using new technologies to become agile and faster than competitors.
The key to NinjaOne’s success is Sal and Chris’ extensive technological expertise, industry experience, and unwavering commitment to organic product development without compromising on quality and customer experience. Feedback from NinjaOne customers underscores this, as they praise the platform’s superior product, delightful user experience, and ease of use. Customers also talked about how they saved hours of manual workflows through NinjaOne’s policy-based automation engine.
NinjaOne’s exemplary customer care and support also fostered a sense of true partnership among its users, a sentiment that’s reflected in their top ratings across multiple categories on G2. This customer-centric approach and Sal and Chris’ deep understanding of the specific needs of their customers also shape NinjaOne’s product development.
Sal said. “Ninja taught me that as a founder, you need to have a heart-to-heart with yourself on how big one of these things could be…Every day, I saw the product getting better and better and customers enjoying it further and further.”
