Creatio raises $200M at a $1.2B valuation for its no-code CRM and workflow platform

Creatio, the no-code CRM and workflow automation platform, on Wednesday announced that it has raised a $200 million funding round led by Sapphire Ventures. StepStone Group and current investors Volition Capital and Horizon Capital also participated in this round.

"The problem we're solving is addressing the need of knowledge workers," Creatio co-founder and CEO Katherine Kostereva told me. "And we're talking about 1.7 billion people in the world [who we want to help] automate their workflows with the power of no-code."

As the demand for software continues to increase, she noted, the number of developers isn't keeping pace. Obviously, Creatio isn't the only company trying to fill this void, and there is no dearth of no-code tools available to businesses today. But Kostereva argues that what sets Creatio apart is that it was always architected to work at an enterprise scale.

"What we deliver to our clients is all front office: sales, customer relationship, marketing, service management processes," she said. That means the company competes with the likes of Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft and SAP, but Kostereva says that being smaller allows Creatio to be more agile than its larger competitors.

And, of course, because this is 2024, Creatio, too, is riding the AI wave with a copilot for its CRM users and no-code creators. "Right now, what we're hearing from people more and more is that cloud technology built back in the beginning of the 2000s, like Salesforce, is considered more like legacy tech. Everyone is looking for new technology, cutting-edge technology — and this is exactly what Creatio delivers with our AI, no-code architectures."

The AI features include capabilities like helping sales teams score opportunities or generate emails, as well as helping the company's no-code creators design workflows and convert text-based requirements into business rules, among various other use cases.

Kostereva stressed 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 given that Creatio was a bootstrapped company for the longest time, it's in its DNA to be capital efficient. But the team is now seeing an opportunity to double down and expand quickly. That means building out its AI capabilities and core no-code features, but also its partner ecosystem, which already drives half the business.

"We are thrilled to partner with CEO Katherine Kostereva and the entire Creatio team," said Rajeev Dham, managing director at Sapphire Ventures. "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."