SOLON, OH—The saying goes that you're known by the company you keep. In the case of MRI Software, among the oldest commercial property technology firms if not the first of its kind, the company it now keeps is among more than 100 software investments made by TA Associates over the years. The Boston-based private equity firm recently selected MRI—founded in 1971, just three years after Peter Brooke launched TA—for its initial foray into real estate software.

“Traditionally, real estate has been a laggard in technology compared to some other industries,” says Patrick Ghilani, CEO of Solon, OH-based MRI. “Here in 2017, that space is maturing with innovation, players, desire and focus from a global perspective.”

Aside from its financial health and track record of both organic and inorganic growth, what attracted TA to MRI was “the fact that we are differentiated in the space, based on the way we go to market with our product and our platform,” Ghilani says. “We are a significantly more open and configurable platform than the largest players in the market, and that, coupled with an almost 50-year legacy of people and service to space, gives us a pretty substantial platform to take those macro financials longer and with a higher trajectory going forward.”