Coherent, a Hong Kong-based no-code software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, announced Wednesday it has closed a $75 million Series B funding round led by Maverick Capital, including Maverick Ventures, with participation from Owl Rock, a Blue Owl division, GreatPoint Ventures, and existing investors Cathay Innovation and Franklin Templeton.
This round, which brings Coherent’s total funding to $89 million, will support the continued expansion of Coherent across the global insurance industry and capitalize on the momentum in new industry verticals, such as capital markets, banking, and asset management, Coherent said in a statement.
The investment will also allow the company to meet increasing demand by fueling the growth of product, engineering, and sales teams in the U.S. and Asia-Pacific regions, onboarding additional services partners, and deploying out-of-box connectors with leading enterprise and SaaS solutions.
Coherent is a global software-as-a-service (SaaS) company redefining how business and information technology (IT) teams build software together. Its core technology Spark automatically converts any business logic within a spreadsheet – such as rules, formulas, and data models – into an Application Programming Interface (API) that can easily connect to other front- and back-end applications.
Spark’s no-code service delivers in minutes what takes months with the current business software development cycle (i.e., the long, manual processes of writing specifications, programming, testing, and iterating). As a result, Spark not only maximizes the impact of existing investments in intellectual capital, tools, and employee expertise, but also frees up already stretched IT teams to focus their specialized and scarce resources on truly innovating for the business.
“Thriving in today’s digital economy requires re-imagining the process of building business software by empowering existing employees with tools they know, instead of replacing or retraining them as programmers. With Coherent Spark, coders and non-coders alike can accelerate digital transformation and cloud migration programs. Customers have slashed their time to market to days instead of months – realizing immediate return-on-investment, and most importantly, the ability to respond faster to their customers,” said John Brisco, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Coherent.
“The optimal solution for business and IT teams to build software together, Coherent Spark will become an indispensable part of any technology stack powering business operations,” he added.
According to the statement, Coherent annual recurring revenue grew more than 10 times and its customer base quadrupled, now stretching over six continents, since the company’s Series A in November 2020.
“Today’s collaborative business world demands a fresh approach for IT teams to build software in a quick and cost-effective way. Coherent Spark is on track to become the standard for managing business logic and operations ubiquitous in spreadsheets everywhere. We are excited to support Coherent’s talented team during this phase of hypergrowth,” said Andrew Homan, Senior Managing Director at Maverick Capital.
Meanwhile, Albert Koh, Investor at Owl Rock, a Blue Owl division, said Coherent Spark bridges the gap between the fast deployment of business applications and the familiarity of using spreadsheets, and Coherent is uniquely positioned to enable enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation and drive quicker time to value.
“The Coherent team brings decades of experience building and deploying software at leading global financial services and insurance organizations, and we are excited to support Coherent’s expansion into new markets,” he added.
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