Creatio raises $200 million to further develop no-code and AI enterprise CRM solutions

Generative AI may be dominating the headlines, but Boston-based Creatio is making news of its own on the strength of its “no code” customer relationship management (CRM) platform and app-building tools.

Today, the 10-year-old software company announced it has raised a significant $200 million at a valuation of $1.2 billion in a round led by Sapphire Ventures with contributions from StepStone Group, Volition Capital, and Horizon Capital.

“Our sole purpose is to bring a lot of innovations to the enterprise, no-code market,” said Andie Dovgan, Chief Growth Officer at Creatio, in a videoconference interview with VentureBeat conducted ahead of the announcement.

Creatio plans to use the money in the round to continue improving its product, expand to new markets, and acquire more customers.

“We are very focused on enterprise-level automation,” stated Dovgan. “We’re going to increase the number of strategic components, those smaller building blocks for different industries like financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing.”

In a press release, Sapphire Ventures managing director Rajeev Dham stated that “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.”

“We couldn’t be more impressed with the company’s growth and the impact that Creatio’s platform brings to its customer community,” added Sean Cantwell, Managing Partner at Volition Capital. “Creatio addresses the complexity and inflexibility of traditional software vendors and enables organizations to seamlessly replace legacy technologies, delivering market-leading ROI [return-on-investment].”

Origins of no-code

In software development, the “no-code” movement kicked off in the 1970s but picked up steam in the early 2000s thanks to big brands like Shopify. It refers to methods of allowing users or engineers at enterprises to create new applications without having to write any code for themselves.

Instead, it uses visual interfaces and drag-and-drop tools to enable those without technical skills to create software. No-code platforms streamline development processes by allowing them to configure applications using pre-built templates and components, with all the coding happening automatically on the backend, out of sight.

Creatio’s play

Launching in 2014 under the name “bpm’online”, Creatio offers a CRM that competes with other giants in the space like Salesforce.

But as CRMs have evolved to include linkages and integrations with other major software programs that salespeople and other customer-facing roles rely upon to do their jobs, such as email, calendars, transcription services, presentation builders, marketing suites, and more.

CRMs have added the ability for users to connect their CRM accounts to their accounts on these third-party external services, as well as offered in-house “app stores” and building programs to further extend their utility.

Creatio’s pitch in the midst of all this development and augmentation of CRMs is quite simple, but powerful: give non-technical users the tools to set up their CRMs with the apps and automations that work best for them, their specific role and workstyle, while maintaining adherence to their company’s policies, standards, security needs, and brand values.

Since launching a decade ago and changing its name to Creatio in 2019, it has found substantial success by pursuing this vision, and is now operating with 700 business partners across 100 countries. Its customers include major Fortune 500 brands such as AMD, Coca Cola, and others.

“The target segment starts from $100 million in [annual] revenue and above,” said Dovgan. “We see a lot of traction with mid-sized enterprises from $1 billion up to $10 billion. That’s where the bulk of our business is coming from. We have customers that are much larger than that, but also much smaller than that, as well.”

Why do companies choose Creatio over larger rivals such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365, or even peers such as Hubspot?

“A lot of our customers think about no-code and Creatio as their secret sauce to gain a market advantage by being disruptive and being able to automate workflows and run applications much quicker than the competition,” Dovgan said.

How the rise of generative AI is rapidly remaking the no-code and enterprise software markets

Of course, having operated and progressed through 10 years of technological changes, Creatio is no stranger to adaptation and embracing new innovations that are helpful for its user base. And today, that includes the rapid rise of generative AI.

In May, the company unveiled a connector for its CRM to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It also launched its own Creatio Copilot and Copilot studio — the former a chatbot assistant allowing users to ask queries from any view within their CRM about the data they were looking at or needed to fetch, the latter allowing them to begin building CRM apps using natural language and choose their underlying foundation AI models from leaders such as OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 or Meta’s Llama family.

“We seeAI and no-code being a new era in the enterprise software,” Dovgan told VentureBeat. “It gives you so much more consolidation and a stronger time to market and time to value because you can put out applications really quickly, at speed and scale.”

Now, newly empowered with cash and the endorsement of leading VCs and investors, Creation believes its greatest chapter of growth lies ahead.

“We feel like there’s an incredible potential for us to evangelize Creatio across the globe,” Dovgan told VentureBeat. “We’ve been attending 150 field events around the globe in the enterprise sector, and we’re definitely going to do more of that.”