Eric Mathewson

Founder of WideOrbit; Board Member, Lumine Group Lumine Group (formerly WideOrbit)

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Eric Mathewson founded WideOrbit and spent roughly twenty-five years turning it into a piece of infrastructure the broadcast industry cannot easily operate without. WideOrbit is the system of record for television and radio advertising — the software in which spots are sold, scheduled, aired, reconciled and billed — and it is used by more than 5,000 broadcast stations and cable networks processing over $35 billion of advertising revenue a year. That is a category where dominance is self-reinforcing, because the traffic and billing system is the last thing a station will replace. He came to it from finance rather than from media, having worked in portfolio management at Montgomery Securities and equity derivatives at Kidder Peabody. Constellation Software’s Lumine Group acquired WideOrbit in 2023, Mathewson handed the chief executive’s role to Susie Hedrick in August 2024, and he now sits on Lumine Group’s board while running Prescient Capital, an investment vehicle focused on AI-enabled software, semiconductors and early-stage companies around San Francisco.

Career Highlights

• Founded WideOrbit and led it as chief executive for roughly a quarter of a century.
• Built the broadcast industry’s dominant system of record, used by 5,000-plus stations and cable networks.
• Platform handles more than $35 billion in annual advertising revenue.
• Sold WideOrbit to Lumine Group, part of Constellation Software, in 2023 — the same transaction in which Lumine Group was spun out as its own listed entity.
• Handed over as CEO on 7 August 2024 to Susie Hedrick, previously senior vice president of sales.
• Serves on Lumine Group’s board of directors alongside chairman Mark Miller and chief executive David Nyland.
• Manages Prescient Capital, investing in AI-enabled software, semiconductors and seed and early-stage startups in the San Francisco area.
• Earlier career in portfolio management at Montgomery Securities and equity derivatives at Kidder Peabody.

Professional Journey

Mathewson’s first career was on Wall Street rather than in media, and in two quite specific corners of it. At Montgomery Securities, the San Francisco investment bank that was one of the defining growth-equity houses of the 1980s and 1990s, he worked in portfolio management. At Kidder Peabody he worked in equity derivatives. Both are analytical, systems-heavy disciplines concerned with transactions at volume, and the background is more relevant to what he built than a media career would have been — broadcast advertising is, operationally, a high-volume inventory and transaction problem wearing a creative industry’s clothes.

WideOrbit was founded in 1999, at the point when broadcast stations were still running traffic and billing on fragmented, often ageing systems, frequently one per station group and rarely able to talk to anything else. The opportunity Mathewson identified was consolidation into a single system of record: one platform where inventory is managed, orders are placed, spots are scheduled and aired, and revenue is reconciled and billed. The strategic property of such a system is that it becomes the operational spine of the business that runs on it, and replacing it means replacing everything at once. That is why WideOrbit’s position, once established, proved so durable, and why the company could extend from radio into television and cable rather than being confined to one.

He ran it for roughly twenty-five years. Over that period the platform reached more than 5,000 broadcast stations and cable networks and came to process upwards of $35 billion in advertising revenue annually — figures that describe not market share in the ordinary sense but something closer to infrastructure status within the US broadcast advertising market. Notably, he did this without the company becoming a famous name outside its industry, which is characteristic of system-of-record software generally: the more essential it is, the less visible.

The exit came in 2023, and the structure of it is worth understanding. WideOrbit was purchased by Lumine Group, the communications and media software arm of Constellation Software — a serial acquirer whose model is to buy vertical market software businesses and hold them permanently rather than flip them. The same transaction was the occasion for Lumine Group’s spin-out as a separately listed entity. For a founder, selling to Constellation is a specific kind of decision: it is an acknowledgement that the company is mature, that its value lies in durable cash generation rather than in a growth story, and that it will be operated for the long term under a disciplined owner rather than rebuilt by a private equity buyer on a five-year clock. In the same year Mathewson attended the Directors College at Stanford Law School, a corporate governance programme for board members — preparation, evidently, for the role he was about to move into.

The handover followed eighteen months later. On 7 August 2024 WideOrbit announced that Susie Hedrick, the company’s senior vice president of sales, would become chief executive. Promoting from within, and from the commercial side, signalled continuity rather than a change of direction; Hedrick’s own framing on appointment was that the team had built a strong foundation. Mathewson stepped back from operations entirely and took a seat on the board of Lumine Group, the parent, where he sits with chairman Mark Miller, chief executive David Nyland, and directors including Brian Beattie, Laurie Schultz, Lucie Laplante and Paul Cowling.

His active work now runs through Prescient Capital, which he manages. Its remit is AI-enabled software and semiconductors along with seed and early-stage rounds in startups largely based in the San Francisco area — a deliberate move away from the media vertical he spent his operating career in and towards the compute layer underneath the current software cycle. The pattern across his career is consistent: he has twice positioned himself at the infrastructure level of an industry rather than at its visible surface.

Education

University of California, Berkeley

Bachelor of Science, Social Science

Stanford Law School

Directors College, corporate governance (2023)