A 47-year-old Ukrainian female founder raised $200 million so she could finally market her B2B tech startup as a unicorn

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Only a fraction of CEOs worldwide are women, Aetna is the first major health insurer to include IUI in its coverage, and a female founder sought the marketing benefits of being called a unicorn. Have a wonderful Wednesday!

- Unicorn watch. For seven years, founder Katherine Kostereva bootstrapped her tech startup Creatio. She focused on building a no-code platform that automates workflow and serves as a customer relationship management tool for knowledge workers from her company's home base in Boston.

Despite building a tech startup, she didn't raise venture capital funding in the early years. She finally did in 2021 and went further in June with a $200 million fundraise that turned Creatio into a unicorn valued at $1.2 billion. Investors in the newest female-founded unicorn included Sapphire Ventures, StepStone Group, Volition Capital, and Horizon Capital.

The fundraise revealed one of the realities of building startups: that it can take raising capital—and giving up equity to investors—for a well-run company to garner the attention that comes with the flashy "unicorn" title . Kostereva developed Creatio as a healthy business for most of its existence, but investor commitment is what got noticed.

That was part of the CEO's strategy. "We wanted to use it as a marketing event to up-level the brand awareness of Creatio among large enterprises," she says of her recent valuation. "It absolutely helped a lot."

With the brand awareness that comes with a unicorn valuation, Kostereva hopes to secure larger enterprise clients. So far, the startup's software is used by 800 organizations (including Colgate-Palmolive and AMD) in more than 100 countries.

Besides the marketing boost, becoming a unicorn hasn't changed much for Creatio, the 47-year-old says. The startup is doing the same work, the same way, albeit at "maximum speed" and with an eye for additional global expansion, she adds.

Her more pragmatic view of the value of a "unicorn" label today—one that can mean less when so many unicorns have flamed out and when other businesses are becoming 'decacorns'—perhaps comes from her unusual background as a female founder outside of Silicon Valley; one who was born in Ukraine, worked for IBM in Europe, and built Creatio in Boston over the past decade.

Overall, she says, "it's a nice milestone."

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

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