Greg Rich

CEO and Co-Founder Vivantio

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Greg Rich is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Vivantio, a service management software company he established in 2003 and has led ever since — an unusually long founder tenure in a category dominated by private-equity roll-ups and venture-backed challengers. Vivantio sells a configurable service management platform used not only by IT departments but by customer service, HR, facilities and other internal service functions, aimed squarely at B2B organisations that have outgrown rigid, one-size-fits-all helpdesk tools. Rich built the business without institutional venture capital, reaching roughly $5 million in annual recurring revenue on the strength of channel partnerships and low-cost digital acquisition rather than an expensive direct sales motion. In March 2026 that trajectory changed shape when Oakman took a majority investment in the company to fund faster product development and go-to-market expansion, with Rich continuing as chief executive.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Vivantio in 2003 and has served as Chief Executive Officer throughout the company’s history.
• Bootstrapped the business to approximately $5 million in annual recurring revenue with no institutional venture funding.
• Took the UK-founded company into the United States in 2011; the US now represents roughly half of revenue, and the company runs distributed teams across both countries.
• Built the early go-to-market motion around channel partners, pay-per-click advertising and customer education rather than a direct enterprise sales force — an explicit response to the founders’ lack of sales and marketing background.
• Announced a majority strategic investment from Oakman on 31 March 2026 to accelerate product innovation and commercial expansion.
• Vivantio has been recognised by G2 and SourceForge for customer satisfaction, ranking in the top 5% of products by customer review.

Professional Journey

Rich’s account of his own career begins well before Vivantio. He has said he started working in customer service at thirteen, alongside parents who ran a small residential home in Somerset, England — an origin he returns to as the source of the company’s service-first framing. That framing is more than rhetorical positioning: Vivantio’s product thesis has consistently been that service management tools optimised for IT ticketing fail the customer-facing service teams who also need them.

He co-founded Vivantio in 2003 with a partner he refers to publicly only as Russ. The timing put the company in the first wave of cloud-delivered service management, at a point when the incumbent tools were on-premises, expensive and configured by consultants. The founders’ identified gap was simpler software that service teams could actually run themselves. Neither founder came from a sales or marketing background, and Rich has described the early commercial strategy as a deliberate workaround for that: rather than hire an expensive direct sales team, Vivantio leaned on channel partner relationships, inexpensive digital marketing and paid search, and on educational content that explained service optimisation to buyers who were not yet shopping for it.

The pivotal commercial decision came in 2011, when the UK-based company pushed into the United States. That market now accounts for around half of Vivantio’s revenue, and the company has operated as a genuinely transatlantic business since, with teams in both the UK and the US and a commercial centre of gravity around Boston. Rich himself is based in the Greater Boston area.

Through two decades Vivantio remained bootstrapped, which shaped both its pace and its priorities — Rich has spoken about reaching roughly $5 million in annual recurring revenue this way and about the difficulty of shifting from a capital-efficient posture into a high-growth one, naming scaled sales and marketing as the constraint. That constraint was addressed directly on 31 March 2026, when Oakman announced a majority strategic investment in the company. Rich remained chief executive and framed the deal around customer outcomes rather than scale for its own sake. The investment marks the end of Vivantio’s bootstrapped era and the beginning of a funded expansion phase under the same founder leadership.

Education

No education was found in any public source for Greg Rich. Vivantio’s own author page, his podcast interviews and the company’s press materials are all silent on his academic background, and no institution is asserted here rather than guessed at.