Vista
Vista was founded in 2000 by Robert Smith for the sole purpose of trading Buyout in the software sector.
Vista today has over 590 employees, including 185 investment professionals and more than 100 professionals in its Operations team.
The firm currently manages $101Bn in assets via 4 fund families: (i) Private Equity ("PE") - $90Bn in assets under management: Vista Equity Partners Funds ("VEPF" - large cap), Vista Foundation Funds ("VFF" - mid-market), Vista Equity Endeavor Funds ("VEEF" - lower mid-market); (ii) "Perennial" strategy: co-investment alongside other Vista PE funds; (iii) credit funds; (iv) listed equities: Vista Public Strategies.
Today, the company operates from 6 offices: a main office in Austin (Texas), San Francisco, Chicago, Oakland, New York (mainly credit team) and Hong Kong.
A North American software leader
With almost 25 years of history and a strategy dedicated to the software sector from the outset, Vista is one of the pioneers of Buyout capital in the software sector in North America. Today, the firm has become one of the sector's undisputed leaders, with over $100Bn in assets under management, almost 600 employees and 13 Buyout funds raised.
An institutionalized approach to value creation
In 2011, the firm institutionalized its operational value creation capabilities by creating the Vista Consulting Group ("VCG"), which is staffed by functional experts and aims to implement the firm's proprietary processes and methodologies (the " Vista Best Practices") in portfolio companies. Vista has developed and formalized some one hundred operational value creation best practices dedicated to software publishers. Vista 's operational resources and investment team form a single integrated team.
Moderate use of financial leverage
Financial leverage typically represents less than 25% of the enterprise value of portfolio companies.
The Vista Foundation funds have generated strong past performance without significant recourse to debt, which is particularly reassuring in a high interest rate environment.
A quality "large cap" organization for investing in the mid-market
The Vista Foundation team targets mid-market companies between $250M and $750M. It has a number of competitive advantages over its independent competitors targeting the same deal sizes, first and foremost its very strong sector expertise and the size of its team with 25 dedicated professionals who have access to a very large number of proprietary internal resources on the Vista platform: 71 junior investment professionals (Analysts and Associates), 4 professionals with capital markets expertise and, above all, over 100 VCG operational resources.
