Boston software firm Creatio was valued at more than $1 billion in a new fund-raising announced on Wednesday, reaching the venture capital world’s “unicorn” status.
The 10-year-old company, which helps people without knowledge of computer programming create apps, raised $200 million to fuel its growth as it expands its use of artificial intelligence. Venture capital firm Sapphire Ventures in Texas was the lead of an investor group which also included Boston-based Volition Capital and Horizon Capital in Ukraine.
Creatio has long included traditional AI features that combine data and algorithms to predict what users might want to add to an app. Now it’s looking at newer techniques with the generative AI technology underlying popular apps like ChatGPT to help customers create programs and content more easily.
“We’ve been using AI since the inception of the company,” chief executive and founder Katherine Kostereva said. “This year, it’s been all around [generative] AI.”
Newer generative AI features allow users to build apps just by describing desired functions. Another set of AI tools helps customers create content such as automated emails and customer responses.
One of many firms in the “no code” software movement, Creatio focuses on building apps for marketing, sales, and customer service tasks. That puts it in competition with industry giants such as Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle. Though headquartered in Boston, Creatio’s workforce is scattered around the world with 700 people in 26 countries, Kostereva said.
A computer science major who grew up in Ukraine, the CEO started her career at IBM and later worked for a company helping install large computer systems. Part of Creatio’s pitch from the start was to help companies adapt programs written for older hardware from IBM and other antiquated systems to run on modern computers and in cloud data centers.
“I saw all this pain of software implementation that was taking years, honestly,” she said. “That all boiled down to the idea to build something new and something that will change the world and that’s how we created Creatio.”
Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman.
