Before Sal Sferlazza sold software that keeps office computers running, he and Chris Matarese tried to make a video game.
In 2001 they founded Realm Interactive and set out to build Exarch, a follow-up to the old space-trading game Trade Wars. Sferlazza hired the comic artist Joe Madureira to draw it. In 2004 the studio was sold to NCSoft, and the game was later released as Dungeon Runners. It is an odd start for a man who now runs a company in IT management.
After the game came a chain of start-ups in the plumbing of corporate IT.
The rest of the early record is about work and exits. Sferlazza graduated from SUNY Albany in 1996. While still in school he did IT consulting for his uncle in New York City, and after graduating he worked as a software consultant at Accenture. Where he was born and grew up did not turn up in the sources we read.
After the game came a chain of start-ups in the plumbing of corporate IT. In 2005 he co-founded Lasso Logic, which built off-site backup and was sold to SonicWall for about $20 million. Next came PacketTrap, a network management company later sold to Quest Software, and then Anchor Networks, a cloud managed service provider sold to eFolder in 2013. That year he and Matarese started NinjaRMM in San Francisco. The sources do not describe what it cost the two men to start again, or how they felt about it.
The product was monitoring and patching software so an IT team can see and fix every computer from one screen. In 2020 Summit Partners invested $30 million for a minority stake, and the company said it remained independent and founder-led. In 2021 it moved to Austin and became NinjaOne.
Then it accelerated. In February 2024 it raised $231 million at a $1.9 billion valuation, led by ICONIQ. A January 2025 agreement to buy Dropsuite for $252 million closed that June at $270 million. A $5 billion valuation followed in 2025, and later a $400 million round at $12.3 billion. A co-founder told CRN the company had passed $600 million in annual recurring revenue from more than 40,000 customers. Channel Dive ranked it third in its market, with 14.6% of 2025 revenue.
It still has hard days. In May 2026 NinjaOne Backup was disrupted by a Windows update, the kind of failure that reaches many customers at once. Profit has not been published.
The lesson is in the pattern. A game studio, a backup firm, a network tool, a cloud provider: each was a try that ended in a sale, and the company that is worth the most now was the fifth. Some founders get there by sticking with one idea. These two got there by starting again.