Creatio CEO Katherine Kostereva, 48, spent the first 15 years of her career working at large enterprises like IBM on their workflow automation processes. She knew firsthand the need for organizations to speed up and simplify automation. 

“I saw this pain,” Kostereva tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “Large organizations struggle with how long it takes to automate their processes.”

That’s how Kostereva came up with the idea for Creatio, a business-to-business workflow platform that automates business tasks from marketing to sales — without clients having to code their own platforms. The company is a market leader for no-code automation, based on a Forrester Wave report from earlier this year. 

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Kostereva founded Creatio in 2014 and was confident in her idea from the start, supported by her years of experience in the industry. Her belief was justified when the company immediately began acquiring and working with new clients. Kostereva was able to establish a revenue stream without raising capital, bootstrapping Creatio through the first seven years of running the business. 

Creatio first raised capital in February 2021, drawing $68 million. Its second raise was in June 2024, when it received $200 million in funding at a $1.2 billion valuation.

“Today, based on our assessment, the company is worth more than $2 billion in value,” Kostereva says. 

Kostereva’s secret to building a multi-billion-dollar company is to always listen to the clients and show genuine care towards them. She says that half of the tools Creatio develops are based on client ideas and feedback.

In the company’s early days, Kostereva spent time in the field directly interfacing with clients while getting Creatio off the ground. “I was a marketer; I was a seller; I was customer support,” she says. “This laser focus on clients and being in the field and working with clients rather than sitting at our desk — that’s the core of success for us.”

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A key aspect of caring for clients is taking care of employees. Creatio has over 1,000 members on its staff and has never had layoffs in the history of the company, according to Kostereva. 

“We genuinely care about our people, and our people care about our clients,” she says. “This customer focus is in the middle of everything we do, and it has helped us from day one.”

Kostereva found Creatio’s first clients through her network of friends and family. One of Creatio’s early clients was a travel agency from Costa Rica called Namu Travel, which is still using the platform today, a decade after first joining. Namu automated all of its internal processes and workflows through Creatio, including different vendor and client relationships, without having to code its own platform. 

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Creatio now has thousands of clients, including AI chipmaker AMD and Coca-Cola. The company closed last year with revenue up 46% year-over-year and continues to grow revenue at over a 40% rate, Kostereva reveals. “We continue to grow at a very fast pace,” she says. 

Kostereva says a trait that sets entrepreneurs apart from other people is that they are resilient when faced with bad news and challenges.  

“Out of 10 pieces of news today, I will have eight or nine bad news, and I will have one or two good news, and I’m okay with that,” Kostereva says. “Being resilient is the most important characteristic of an entrepreneur.”

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