Creatio has announced a funding round of $200 million led by Sapphire Ventures. With participation from StepStone Group and existing investors Volition Capital and Horizon Capital. The funding round also saw a new valuation for Creatio of $1.2 billion.
The round is a minority investment aimed at fuelling the company’s growth worldwide and continuing to develop its low-code platform. The funding will help Creatio further develop its AI capabilities, including the Copilot generation tool it launched earlier this year. It also follows the launch of its Quantum release. Which delivered a fully composable architecture for its platform, preparing the way for further additions.
Creatio is already looking to increase its headcount worldwide. With nearly 60 open positions across the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. It will also look to strengthen its leadership team in the coming months. The roles available look to strengthen R&D, Marketing, Sales and customer success.
Creatio has delivered at least 50% growth annually for several years. Recent success stories include OTP Bank and Cornerstone Bank. Companies have taken its no-code platform and either customized its ready-made CRM or built automation for their processes.
Rajeev Dham, Managing Director at Sapphire Ventures, commented, “We are thrilled to partner with CEO Katherine Kostereva and the entire Creatio team. Creatio’s true AI-powered no-code platform – built on a unique, composable architecture – offers exceptional flexibility and usability that empowers enterprise customers to swiftly build, deploy and personalize applications for a variety of use cases across CRM, case management, and workflow automation.
“The power and agility of the platform combined with the team’s relentless dedication have allowed them to deliver remarkable ROI and time to value for their customers.”
Three priorities to drive growth
Creatio will use the funding across three broad priorities:
Driving Innovations in no-code and AI
The company will double down on its investments in R&D, focusing on expanding AI-assisted development and Copilot capabilities. To ensure rapid, secure, and scalable no-code automation, Creatio will continue to innovate in the no-code governance and ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) space. Additionally, Creatio will expand its portfolio of ready-to-use components and templates tailored for various verticals. Including financial services, insurance, manufacturing and distribution, to name a few.
Expanding the Partner Channel Globally
Creatio maintains a partner-centric strategy and culture, with 50% of its business coming from channel partners. Creatio’s partner program has received a 5-star rating in the CRN Partner Program Guide for seven consecutive years. Together with its partners, Creatio serves thousands of customers in 100 countries that use the platform in 23 different languages. With the new investment, Creatio will further empower its channel network to jointly deliver remarkable business outcomes to customers.
Growing One Team
Creatio has a global team with representatives in 25 countries. Operating as One Team is a defining part of the company’s DNA. Creatio will expand its team further across all key areas (R&D, customer success, marketing, sales, etc.). To keep delivering immediate results and personalized touch. Driven by Genuine Care, which is the core value of Creatio, the company will continue building meaningful and long-lasting relationships with its customers and partners.
Katherine Kostereva, CEO of Creatio, commented, “Together with our channel partners, Creatio is on a mission to deliver an unprecedented time-to-value to our clients through the powerful combination of no-code and AI. With this investment, we will continue to disrupt the traditional enterprise software approach, helping our clients to accelerate time-to-value and use technology as a competitive differentiation in their business.”
Recognition
Creatio continues to receive recognition from Analyst firms. Most recently, it was listed as the only leader in The Forrester Wave: low-code Platforms For Citizen Developers, Q1 2024. John Bratincevic, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, said, “Creatio is an obvious choice for its SaaS customers and a leading option for enterprises that want well-governed citizen development and superior automation at scale.”
Other similar recognition has come from other analyst firms, including Everest Group, Nucleus Research, and Gartner. Creatio was also placed as a leader in the Spring G2 Grid for low-code development platforms.
Volition Capital, which led the $68 million Series A round in 2021, is also impressed. Sean Cantwell, Managing Partner at Volition Capital, said, “We couldn’t be more impressed with the company’s growth and the impact that Creatio’s platform brings to its customer community. Creatio addresses the complexity and inflexibility of traditional software vendors and enables organizations to seamlessly replace legacy technologies, delivering market-leading ROI.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is a significant fund raise that should enable Creatio to maintain its 50% growth over the next few years. What has enabled it to achieve this to date is its partner-centric model, which seems to be working. Partners are seeing the benefits of leveraging the mature no-code platform to bring huge benefits to a wide range of industry sectors.
What will be interesting it to see is how Creatio continues to differentiate its product from rivals. Such as Microsoft, Zoho and Kissflow, all of which have stable platforms and money to invest in development.
What isn’t clear from this announcement is how the board makeup will change. With Sapphire presumably adding at least one person to the board. Currently, investors are represented by Sean Cantwell and Roger Hurwitz of Volition Capital and Dmytro Boroday of Horizon Capital.
