Christopher Matarese

President, Chief Financial Officer and Co-Founder NinjaOne

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Christopher Matarese co-founded NinjaOne and serves as its President and Chief Financial Officer, alongside co-founder and chief executive Sal Sferlazza. NinjaOne is an Austin-based unified IT operations platform — endpoint management, autonomous patching, backup and remote access in one console — and the notable thing about its position is not the $5 billion valuation but who still owns it. After taking $500 million in Series C extensions from ICONIQ Growth and CapitalG in February 2025, the company stated plainly that its two co-founders remain its largest equity holders, hold majority control of the board and a majority of voting power, and that the business carries no debt. Matarese holds the finance seat in that arrangement, and has used it to argue publicly for the opposite of the private-equity playbook.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder, President and Chief Financial Officer of NinjaOne, and a member of its board of directors.
• With Sal Sferlazza, one of the two largest equity holders in NinjaOne, with majority control of the board and a majority of the company’s voting power.
• Led the financing that brought $500 million in Series C extensions at a $5 billion valuation in February 2025, led by ICONIQ Growth and CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent investment fund.
• Kept the company debt-free and founder-controlled through that raise, and funded the $262 million acquisition of SaaS backup and data protection company Dropsuite.
• Helped build a business NinjaOne says now serves around 40,000 customers in more than 140 countries, with over 2,000 employees.

Professional Journey

NinjaOne describes its own beginning simply: founded in 2014 with the belief that IT teams deserved better, and headquartered in Austin. Matarese co-founded it with Sal Sferlazza, and the division of labour between the two has held ever since — Sferlazza on product and engineering as chief executive, Matarese on the commercial and financial side as President and Chief Financial Officer. Both sit on the board of directors, which the company lists alongside representatives of ICONIQ, Summit Partners and CrowdStrike’s chairman.

The clearest public expression of his role came with the February 2025 funding announcement. NinjaOne raised $500 million in Series C extensions in separate tranches led by ICONIQ Growth and CapitalG, at a $5 billion valuation — roughly double the $1.9 billion it had been worth a year earlier. What the company chose to emphasise in that release was the structure rather than the number: no debt, still founder-led and founder-controlled, with the two co-founders remaining the biggest equity holders and holding board and voting control after the round. Raising half a billion dollars without ceding control is a financing outcome, and it is the outcome for which the chief financial officer is accountable.

Matarese used his quote in that release to draw the contrast directly. Describing Sferlazza as “a technical, product-first CEO who is obsessed with creating the best possible experience for NinjaOne customers”, he went on: “Many private equity funded companies focus on cutting services to increase profits. At NinjaOne, we believe in investing more to provide additional value to our customers.” It is an unusual thing for a CFO to say on the record, and it is consistent with the company’s stated overinvestment in support — NinjaOne claims a 98% customer satisfaction score sustained for more than five years.

The capital was earmarked for research and development in autonomous endpoint management, autonomous patching and vulnerability remediation, and for the company’s $262 million acquisition of Dropsuite, a SaaS backup and data protection business, which was pending at the time of the announcement. NinjaOne has continued to expand the platform since, adding mobile device management and, most recently, browser management, and was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Management Tools.

Education

No education record could be established from any first-party or filed source. NinjaOne publishes no biography for him — its leadership page carries names and titles only. Secondary sources state that he holds a law degree from Harvard Law School and an undergraduate degree in Government from Harvard University, but nothing first-party supports that, so it is not asserted here.