Katherine Kostereva bootstrapped Creatio in 2014 with a small team and no external capital, building what would become one of the leading no-code CRM and workflow platforms in the world. In October 2024, the company celebrated its 10th anniversary by crossing the $1 billion valuation threshold — becoming Boston’s first tech unicorn of the year. The Boston Business Journal sat down with Kostereva to talk about the early days, the scaling mindset, and where she lands on the “founder mode” debate.
When and how did you start Creatio?
The company was founded here in Boston exactly 10 years ago, but from the beginning, we founded this company to be a global company. I had been in the tech industry my entire career and I felt a deep need for software that could give businesses the freedom to own their own automation — without having to write code. We bootstrapped without any external capital or funding. That meant we had to be disciplined about profitability from day one, which shaped how we think about growth today. It was not a constraint; it was a design choice.
The idea of no-code automation predates the current generative AI wave. Did you always believe the market would arrive?
Absolutely. The core idea was always that any business idea should be automatable in minutes — by anyone, not just software developers. In the early years, the challenge was convincing enterprises to trust that approach for complex, mission-critical workflows. What changed over time was not the vision; it was the technology maturity and, honestly, the mindset shift in enterprise IT. Companies started to realise that developer bottlenecks were costing them far more than the risk of empowering knowledge workers with powerful tools. The market caught up to the idea.
“The core idea was always that any business idea should be automatable in minutes — by anyone, not just software developers.”
Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham recently popularised the concept of “founder mode” — the idea that the best companies are led by founders who stay deeply involved in operations. Where do you fall on that?
I consider myself the CEO of the company more than a founder. The founding is something that happened. Running the company is what I do every day. The founder mode debate implies a binary — either you are in everything or you have delegated everything. But the job of the CEO is to build a system that scales: the right people, the right structure, the right culture. That is more interesting to me than any particular operational detail. Scaling is more fun than founding, honestly. Founding is stressful and uncertain. Scaling is where you see what you have actually built.
Creatio has been included in five Gartner Magic Quadrants and seven Forrester Waves. How do you think about the relationship between analyst recognition and actual business momentum?
Analyst recognition matters enormously in enterprise software because procurement decisions are long and involve many stakeholders. A Magic Quadrant placement is not a vanity metric for us — it influences the deals we get into. But the way you earn that recognition is through customer outcomes, not through analyst relations programmes. Creatio has some of the highest customer satisfaction scores in the industry. That is what drives the analyst positioning, not the other way around.
“The future of enterprise software isn’t code vs. no-code vs. coding agents — it’s all of them working together.”
Where does AI fit into Creatio’s platform architecture now?
We are AI-native, which means we have built AI into the core of the platform rather than bolting it on. The vision is a world where human-led workflows and AI-driven agentic workflows run together seamlessly — 24 hours a day, in leaner organisations than have ever been possible before. The future is not code versus no-code versus coding agents. It is all of them working in combination. And AI is not replacing people — it is amplifying them. Even as AI gets deeply embedded across the organisation, human insight and expertise still create the greatest value. You still need the analyst, the architect, the sales engineer. AI makes them faster and more capable.
You grew up in Ukraine and earned your computer science degree in Kyiv. What do you want people to understand about Ukrainian tech talent?
Ukrainian engineers are among the most skilled and driven in the world. That is not patriotism speaking — it is something that any global technology company that has worked with Ukrainian teams will tell you. There is a culture of rigour, of problem-solving under constraints, of not waiting for permission. I built Creatio with that mindset. What is happening in Ukraine right now is devastating, but the human capital is not destroyed. It is dispersed. And that talent continues to build things that matter — in Boston, in San Francisco, in Warsaw, and still in Kyiv.