Black billionaire Robert F. Smith buys Smartsheet for $8.4 billion

Black billionaire Robert F. Smith, CEO and founding father of Vista Equity Partners, is partnering with Blackstone to accumulate Smartsheet.

Smartsheet is a contemporary enterprise work management platform utilized by corporations around the globe. According to A press releaseroughly 85% of Fortune 500 corporations in 2024 use the Smartsheet platform.

“For over a decade, we have built a thriving community of employees, partners and customers, each focused on building and using Smartsheet’s industry-leading work management platform. The next phase of growth and customer success begins. We look forward to working with Blackstone and Vista Equity Partners to accelerate our vision of modernizing work management in enterprises around the world,” said Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet.

Vista is a worldwide investment firm with over $100 billion in assets under management as of March 31, 2024. The firm is thought for investing exclusively in enterprise software, data and technology corporations.

Blackstone is the world’s largest alternative asset manager and strives to deliver attractive returns to institutional and individual investors by strengthening the businesses during which they select to speculate.

“Modern enterprises rely on Smartsheet’s simple and scalable solutions to manage a diverse range of business-critical processes on a daily basis because they enable seamless collaboration, increased productivity, and faster, more informed decision-making” – Monti Saroya, co-head of Vista Flagship Fund, and John Stalder , managing director of Vista, said in a joint statement.

“We look forward to working closely with Blackstone and Smartsheet to support their ambitious goal of making the platform available to every organization, team and employee tasked with collaborating to achieve successful outcomes,” they added.

Who is black billionaire Robert F. Smith?

According to him website, Smith was born to 2 working-class parents in a predominantly black middle-class neighborhood in Denver. Giving back was instilled in him at a young age.

“Every month for over 50 years, he watched as (his parents) donated their limited resources to charities such as the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), regardless of what was going on in their personal lives,” reads a press release on his website website.

It is obvious that higher education was also a priority for Smith. He earned a chemical engineering degree from Cornell University and later attended Columbia’s Business School. After graduating in 1994, he worked in investment banking in mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs in New York and later in San Francisco.

In 2000, Smith founded Vista Equity Partners (Vista), a number one global investment firm. Under his leadership, the corporate’s portfolio includes several of the world’s leading enterprise software corporations.

reports Smith is price $10.8 billion.

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