Billionaire tech investor Robert Smith has sold software maker Apptio to IBM for $4.6 billion, more than doubling his initial $1.9 billion investment from 2019 through his buyout firm, Vista Equity Partners.

Apptio is a cloud-based information technology financial planning platform. It sells online services that help companies — including the majority of the Fortune 100 — manage their information-technology budgets, forecasting and analysis, Bloomberg reported. 

One of the best-performing private equity firms, Vista is best known for buying out software companies, fixing them up and maximizing profits. The company manages equity assets of more than $96 billion and oversees a portfolio of more than 80 software, data and tech-enabled companies employing 100,000 people worldwide.

Smith has overseen more than 300 buyout transactions since founding Vista, which has posted annualized returns of 31 percent since its inception in 2000, Forbes reported.

“We have never lost money in a buyout,” Smith said at Cornell University’s Entrepreneurship Summit in 2017.

In 2019, Smith surprised the graduating class of historically Black Morehouse College during a commencement speech when he promised to pay off the entire class’ student loan debt — an estimated $40 million.

In less than three years, Vista said it has completed or signed 18 exits, recapitalizations, block sales and a follow-on offering, generating $18 billion in total value.

“At a time when exit activity within private equity has fallen considerably, Vista has continued to maintain its momentum,” the company said in a June 26 press release.

Smith has an estimated real-time net worth of $8 billion as of June 28, Forbes reported.

In October 2020, Smith admitted to tax evasion and paid $139 million to avoid prosecution in an agreement with the Department of Justice and Internal Revenue Service.

As a college student, Smith landed an internship at Bell Labs after calling the company every week for five months. He worked as an engineer at Kraft Foods and Goodyear Tire before earning an MBA at Columbia University. Smith started his investment banking career at Goldman Sachs in the late 1990s. There, he met billionaire Robert Brockman who helped fund Vista. By 2018, Smith had bypassed Oprah Winfrey as the richest Black person in the U.S.