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Creatio raises $68M as the low-code space keeps attracting huge checks

by Alex Wilhelm

This morning Creatio, a Boston-based software company, announced that it has raised $68 million. Volition Capital, a growth-equity fund, led the round. The deal was a minority investment in the startup.

The deal is notable not merely thanks to its sheer size, but because up until today Creatio had bootstrapped. That’s according to founder and CEO Katherine Kostereva, with whom TechCrunch caught up with last week regarding the investment.

Per Kostereva, her company’s low-code platform helps other companies automate business processes. Creatio’s competitive edge, she said, comes in part from how quickly it can help companies automate; the faster that companies can get from a low-code platform to live apps matters.

Creatio also has a genre-focus, namely that it touts its platform’s ability to help automate work in the CRM space — think marketing and sales-related tasks. But its crowning “jewel,” Kostereva said, is Creatio’s underlying low-code automation platform.

The low-code world that Creatio competes in is a broad space that is seeing active investment from the very-early to the very-late stage. For example, last month TechCrunch covered no-code focused Stacker’s $1.7 million round. And earlier this month TechCrunch wrote about low-code focused OutSystems’ $150 million raise at a $9.5 billion valuation.

To see another low-code company raise a big check was therefore not too surprising.

Five VCs discuss how no-code is going horizontal across the world’s industries

TechCrunch was curious where the company and its founder came down on the concept of low-code versus (Read more...)

A16z doesn’t invest, it manifests

by Natasha Mascarenhas

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. In very good Show News™, Chris is back! He’s working on the next iteration of the show, something that you will be able to see starting Very Soon. Get hyped!

Today though, we had a delectable dish of dynamic doings, namely news items of the following persuasion:

5 creator economy VCs see startup opportunities in monetization, discovery and much more

Low-code focused OutSystems raises $150M at a $9.5B valuation

by Alex Wilhelm

This morning OutSystems, a low-code app development service, announced that it has closed $150 million in new capital. The round was led by Abdiel Capital and Tiger Global. Notably this is not the largest funding event that the Portugal and U.S.-based software company has raised. TechCrunch covered a $360 million round that OutSystems raised in 2018.

OutSystems was founded in 2001, making it older than most companies that we cover on TechCrunch, and yet it remains privately held. And like many startups, it appears to have caught a tailwind from the accelerating digital transformation of companies both large and small.

By selling $150 million worth of its own shares at a $9.5 billion valuation, OutSystems parted ways with around 1.6% of itself in the deal. Investors would not be willing to buy such a tiny slice of a company for such a price if they didn’t have confidence in its future performance.

The new funds put OutSystems on an IPO path, we reckon; the company declined to discuss public market plans with TechCrunch. It could go out sooner rather than later. This round smells a bit like pre-IPO capital, and OutSystems touted its model to TechCrunch as “efficient” in a conversation about its new funding, implying moderate cash-consumption at worst.

TechCrunch had asked the company to break down its stated plan to invest its new capital in both go-to-market (GTM) capabilities and product (R&D) work. OutSystems CEO Paulo Rosado told TechCrunch in an email that even before this (Read more...)