Vista
Vista was founded in 2000 by Robert Smith with the sole purpose of carrying out Buyout transactions in the software sector.
Vista now has more than 590 employees, including 185 investment professionals, and more than 100 professionals in its Operations team.
The firm currently manages $101 billion of assets through four fund families: (i) Private Equity (PE) - $90 billion of 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 funds alongside other Vista PE funds; (iii) credit funds; (iv) listed equities Vista Public Strategies.
The firm currently operates from 6 offices: The head office in Austin (Texas), and offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Oakland, New York (mainly the credit team) and Hong Kong.
A North American software industry leader
- With almost 25 years’ standing and a strategy dedicated to the software sector from the start, Vista is a North American software publisher Buyout pioneer.
- The firm has now become one of the sector’s undisputed leaders, with over $100 billion of assets under management, almost 600 employees and 13 buyout funds raised.
An institutionalised approach to value creation
- In 2011, the firm institutionalised its operational value creation capabilities by setting up the Vista Consulting Group (VCG), which has functional experts and whose purpose is to implement the firm’s proprietary processes and methodologies (Vista Best Practices) in portfolio companies.
- Vista has developed and formalised around one hundred operational value creation best practices for software publishers. Vista’s operating personnel 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 delivered strong performances without significant leveraging, which is particularly reassuring in a high interest rate environment.
A large cap-like organisation for mid-market investing
- The Vista Foundation team targets mid-market companies whose size is between $250 million and $750 million.
- It has numerous competitive advantages over its independent competitors targeting the same deal sizes, starting with its extremely solid sector expertise and the size of its team, which numbers 25 dedicated professionals who have access to the Vista platform’s many proprietary in-house resources: 71 junior investment professionals (analysts and associates), 4 professionals who are experts in the capital markets and, above all, more than 100 operating personnel accessed through VCG.
Vista Foundation Fund
