Creatio Looks To Go Big With Low-Code After $68M Raise

Boston-based Creatio has received its first outside funding, a $68 million minority stake the company hopes to use to allow its customers to adapt to the ever-changing business world.

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The raise was led by growth equity firm Volition Capital, with participation from Horizon Capital, a private equity firm investing in Europe.

Creatio, a customer relationship and process management company, decided to take in its first capital after seeing “rapid exponential” growth and realizing its highest net retention rate in its history at 122 percent.

“On the heels of this rapid growth we decided to raise capital for the first time,” said co-founder and CEO Katherine Kostereva.

Big market, big players

Creatio’s low-code platform is based on a business process management engine and marketing, sales and services management applications built on top. The low-code aspect allows Creatio’s thousands of customers to customize the platform quickly and add new processes as the business world changes, Kostereva said.

While the market is big — the low-code market has been estimated by Research and Markets to grow to more than $187 billion in the next decade — there also are large competitors, Kostereva said. CRM providers such as Oracle, SAP, Salesforce1 and Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM all compete in the market, but Creatio’s low-code platform allows even non-developers to tailor the platform up to 10 times faster, Kostereva said.

“Creatio is executing against a big vision — to create a world where everyone can automate business ideas in minutes,” said Roger Hurwitz, managing partner at Volition Capital.

Bootstrapped

Hurwitz said the company’s bootstrapped roots since being founded in 2014 also made it an attractive investment.

“Creatio has already scaled tremendously as a founder-owned, bootstrapped company, which is something we look for as growth-equity investors,” he said.

Kostereva said she deliberately held off on raising money until the 600-person company had proven its platform and business in the market through its numbers. Now that it’s been able to do that and raise capital, the company will focus on execution, especially expanding on its 700-plus partner ecosystem in 110 countries.

“Our goal is to grow as fast as we can,” she said. “This is a huge market.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.