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Stacker raises $20M Series A to help business units build software without coding
No-code platforms have developed into a hot market, and Stacker, a London-based no-code platform, is attempting to bring the concept to a new level. Not only can you create a web application from a spreadsheet, you can pull data from a variety of sources to create a sophisticated business application automatically (although some tweaking may be required).
Today the company announced a $20 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from existing investors Initialized Capital, Y Combinator and Pentech. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $23 million, according to Crunchbase data.
Michael Skelly, CEO and co-founder at Stacker, says that the idea is to take key business data and turn it into a useful app to help someone do their job more efficiently. “[We enable] people in business to create apps to help them in their working life — so things like customer portals, internal tools and things that take the data they’re already using, often to run a process, and turn that into an app,” Skelly explained.
“We really think that in order to actually be useful for business, you need to be hooked into the data that a business cares about. And so we let people bring their spreadsheets, SQL databases, Salesforce data, bring all the data that they use to run their business, and automatically turn it into an app,” he said.
Once the company pulls that data in and creates an app, the user can begin to tweak how things look, but Stacker gives them a big head start toward creating something usable from the get-go, Skelly said.
Jennifer Li, a partner at lead investor Andreessen Horowitz, likes the startup’s approach to no-code. “We’ve been watching the no-code space for a while, and Stacker stands apart from the rest because of its thoughtful product approach, allowing business operators to instantly generate a functional app that perfectly fits existing business processes,” she said in a blog post announcing the funding round.
The company currently has 19 employees, with plans to put the new capital to work to reach 30-40 by the end of the year. Skelly sees building a diverse company as a key goal and is proactive and thoughtful about finding ways to achieve that. In fact, he has identified three ways to approach diversity.
“Firstly is just making sure that we get a diverse pipeline of people. I really think that the ratio of the people you talk to is probably going to be the biggest indicator of the people you hire. Secondly we try to find ways we can hire people who are maybe further down their career profile, but [looking] to grow,” he said.
Thirdly, and I think this is something that is not talked about enough, there are plenty of people who would like to get into programming roles, and who are underrepresented, and so we have members of our team who are converting from various non-technical roles to DevOps — and I think it’s just like a really great route to add to the overall pool [of diverse candidates],” he said.
The company is remote-first, with Skelly in London and his co-founder based in Geneva, and they intend to stay that way. They founded the company in 2017 and originally created a different product that was much more complex and required a lot of hand holding before eventually concluding that making it simple was the way to go. They released the first version of the current product at the end of 2019.
The company has a big vision to be the software development tool for business units. “We really think that in the future just like everyone’s got email, a chat tool, a spreadsheet and a video conferencing tool nowadays, they will also have a software tool where they write and run the custom software that they run their business on,” he said.
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Creatio raises $68M as the low-code space keeps attracting huge checks
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.
TechCrunch was curious where the company and its founder came down on the concept of low-code versus no-code, a topic that is always good to ask players in either space. Kostereva highlighted the importance of citizen developers, folks who can use drag-and-drop interfaces to create apps but who are less adept with code. But she added that with today’s no-code tools one can only build simple things. Creatio, she continued, is more focused on the mid-market and enterprise. As such, it’s just not possible for Creatio to go no-code today. But, her view did appear to be that citizen devs should be able to do more and more in time without code.
It’s a fair perspective, and an encouraging one. The more that folks can do sans code, the more power that can shift into the hands of business orgs that traditionally had to depend on other departments for dev lift.
Back to the money side of things; Creatio has historically targeted breakeven financial results, per its CEO. That means it reinvested in itself as it grew, an arrangement that made us curious as to why the company would raise capital now; why change up a working formula?
In short the company was getting itself ready to accelerate, according to its founder. Kostereva said that she wanted Creatio to have “world-class” numbers for metrics like net retention, revenue growth and net promoter score before it took on external funds.
Was the wait worth it? The company’s net retention was 122% last year, and its NPS score is 34, she disclosed. On the growth side of things, Kostereva said that her company started off doubling and tripling and is still close to doubling. Our read of her comments is that Creatio is probably growing its ARR in the high double digits today.
The company wants to use its capital to invest in sales and marketing to help spread the the word about its business, invest in its partner program, a key growth mechanism, and R&D, it said. So, a little bit of everything.
TechCrunch has recently noticed just how big the software world really is, indexing off the fast that there is enough room for a host of OKR-focused startups to grow and raise external capital without weeding out weaker players. Given how many business processes there are in the world to automate, it may be that Creatio and other low-code platforms that want to help other companies accelerate will enjoy similar market dynamics. Investors, at least, are betting like that’s the case.
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