Good businesses should stay local.

Ojenta exists to help established, local businesses carry on into their next chapter. Many owners who spent decades building trusted companies are reaching retirement, and many want a real succession, not just a sale. They want their employees cared for, their customers served well, and their name to keep its meaning in the community.

Ojenta is the buyer, not a go-between. For each business, we team with a Protege, a capable future owner-operator, and buy the business together. We aim to keep the name, the staff and the local roots, and to give the next generation of leaders a real path to ownership.

Our founder

Ojenta was founded by Mark Riggins, who joined Amazon in 1998 and was promoted in the first group of engineers Amazon recognized as Principal Engineers. There he led the teams that built Amazon’s first distributed service and the database work that carried the company through its early holiday-season growth. He later returned as the Principal Engineer on Amazon’s Shipping Platform and retired in 2024.

Before Amazon, Mark was a security architect at Visto, where he helped pioneer secure cloud storage and synchronization and is a named inventor on more than twenty U.S. patents and applications. Earlier, at AT&T Bell Labs, he worked on one of the first Internet firewalls. He is based in Greensboro, North Carolina.

He started Ojenta to bring the same discipline, building things that hold up under pressure, to Main Street. As many longtime owners near retirement, too many good local businesses close instead of carrying on. Ojenta gives those businesses a path to new local leadership, so communities keep the companies their founders spent a lifetime building.

Mark holds an M.S. in Computer Engineering from NC State University and a B.S. in Mathematics, summa cum laude, from UNC Greensboro.

We work carefully and plainly, one business at a time, with every transaction subject to diligence and final agreements.