Workday's Dave Duffield, 85, builds a third $1 billion company

David Duffield, the 85-year-old American software entrepreneur behind PeopleSoft and Workday, has produced a third billion-dollar company. Ridgeline, which builds software for investment-management firms, has raised $250 million at a $1.4 billion valuation.

Duffield co-founded Ridgeline in 2017 and is its chairman. He led the funding round himself, alongside outside investors, and has put more than $400 million of his own money into the company since it started. He is worth $13.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The company makes software for firms that manage investments. Clients have now committed more than $750 billion in assets under management to its platform, up 50 per cent on a year earlier, and it is on track to pass $1 trillion by the end of January 2027. It employs more than 600 people across offices in Incline Village, Reno, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The new money is aimed squarely at artificial intelligence. "We see what's happening with AI and we see the opportunity for what we could accomplish," chief executive David Blair said. "We decided to invest heavily in research and development and that is really the foundation for the raise."

Blair said he would "love" to see Ridgeline become Duffield's third company to list publicly.

Duffield has started six companies over his career. Two of them went public PeopleSoft, which he founded in 1987 and which Oracle acquired after a hostile takeover battle, and Workday, which he co-founded in 2005 and which remains one of the largest enterprise software companies in the United States.

He lives in Incline Village, the affluent Lake Tahoe community in northern Nevada where Ridgeline also has an office, and where Blair says the two men meet for breakfast every week. His philanthropy includes a fund named for his late miniature schnauzer.