No-code CRM and workflow automation platform Creatio announced Wednesday that it has raised $200 million in funding led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from StepStone Group and current investors Volition Capital and Horizon Capital.
“The problem we're trying to solve is serving the needs of knowledge workers,” said Catherine Kostereva, co-founder and CEO of Creatio, “and we're talking about 1.7 billion people around the world. [who we want to help] Automate your workflows with the power of no-code.
Image credit: Creatio
Demand for software continues to grow, but the number of developers hasn't kept up, she noted. Of course, Creatio isn't the only company trying to fill this void. And there's no shortage of no-code tools available to businesses today. But Kostereva argues that what sets Creatio apart is that it's always been designed to work at enterprise scale.
“What we offer our clients is all front-office: sales, customer relationship marketing, and service management processes,” she said. That means the company competes with companies like Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft and SAP, but Costerova says its smaller size allows Creatio to be more agile than its larger competitors.
And of course, it's 2024, so Creatio is also riding the AI wave as a co-pilot for CRM users and no-code creators. “Today, we hear more and more that cloud technologies built in the early 2000s, like Salesforce, are seen as more of a legacy technology. Everyone is looking for new technology, cutting-edge technology. And this is exactly what Creatio offers with its AI no-code architecture.”
Image credit: Creatio
AI capabilities include a variety of use cases, such as helping sales teams qualify opportunities and generate emails, as well as helping the company's no-code authors design workflows and translate text-based requirements into business rules.
Kosteleba emphasized that machine learning-based tools have long been part of Creatio's toolset, but generative AI has allowed the company to take this a step further.
She noted that the company is currently growing 50% year-over-year, and that Creatio has been a bootstrapped company for a long time, so being capital efficient is in its DNA. But the team now sees an opportunity to double down and scale rapidly. That means not only building out its AI capabilities and core no-code capabilities, but also the partner ecosystem that's already driving half of its business.
“We are excited to partner with CEO Catherine Kostereva and the entire Creatio team,” said Rajeev Dam, Managing Director at Sapphire Ventures. “Creatio's true AI-powered no-code platform is built on a unique composable architecture, providing great flexibility and ease of use, allowing enterprise customers to rapidly build, deploy and customize 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 tireless efforts, have enabled us to deliver superior ROI and time to value to our customers.”