Katherine Kostereva and the art of making herself unnecessary

Before Katherine Kostereva sold software, she sold space in newspapers. Between the ages of 16 and 20, she went door to door offering advertising, meeting about ten new people a day. There are more comfortable introductions to business. A newspaper has a deadline, an advertiser has doubts, and a young salesperson has to find a reason for the conversation to continue.

Years later, leading Creatio, she would describe a telling moment in the company’s growth: business kept arriving without her personally driving every deal. The team could generate leads. Partners could close sales. The organization could carry on. For a founder who had learned by making the pitch herself, that was a considerable change in the job description.

Her career has moved between those two kinds of work: persuading someone to take a chance, then building the machinery that makes persuasion repeatable. Creatio’s software follows a related ambition. Give people who understand a business more ability to change how it runs. Shorten the journey between knowing what needs doing and being able to do it.

Ten new people a day

Kostereva was born in Ukraine. Her first paid work, she says, was tutoring younger children at 14. Technology interested her while she was still at school, but her early working life also involved the decidedly analog business of asking people to buy advertisements. The combination matters. She entered software with experience of customers as well as computers.

She graduated with a computer science degree in 1999 from the International Science and Technology University in Kyiv. An MBA followed. At IBM, where she worked in Kyiv and with its European marketing organization, she encountered a company operating across countries and industries. The scale of the business gave her a wider view of what technology could do.

A phrase on an IBM office wall stayed with her: the instruction to think globally while acting locally. That principle later became a practical problem for her own company. Selling enterprise software across borders requires both a common product and people who understand the buyer’s circumstances. A headquarters cannot substitute for every conversation in every country.

Her account of the early CRM opportunity is refreshingly concrete. Businesses were losing the history of their dealings with customers. They needed to put those interactions in one place. She and a developer friend discussed the demand and began building. She was drawn to combining customer relationship management with business process management: keep the record, but also organize what happens next.

The customer paid for the next chapter

That earlier software entrepreneurship began in the early 2000s. Creatio’s own Boston founding dates to 2014. The distinction helps make sense of a career that was already underway before the company’s current chapter began. She arrived with experience of enterprise buyers, software delivery, and the distance between a useful idea and a working business.

The small team behind Creatio started without external capital. Customers supplied the money that allowed the business to continue. In this arrangement, a product decision has a particularly attentive audience. Someone has to find the result useful enough to pay for it. The company then has to turn that payment into salaries, development, and another opportunity to sell.

The problem she chose was the time businesses spent waiting for software changes. Enterprise automation could take quarters or years. Creatio’s answer was to let users design applications and workflows visually, assembling components rather than writing everything from scratch. The intended beneficiary was the person who knew the business process but lacked the skills to program it.

Imagine a sales manager who understands how an inquiry should become an order. Knowing the sequence does not automatically give that manager control of the tools. Someone still has to translate the work into software. Kostereva’s proposition was to bring those activities closer together. The commercial opportunity lay in all the useful ideas stuck waiting for that translation.

Please fasten your brand identity

Enterprise software tends to announce a new name with a press release. In 2019, bpm’online introduced the Creatio name with an airplane. Approximately 160 employees went skydiving, including Kostereva. A banner bearing the new identity appeared during the descent. It was a fairly literal interpretation of launching a brand.

She had never made a jump before. Afterward, she sounded pleased enough to consider a repeat. The episode adds something useful to the portrait: a CEO selling the reduction of business friction was willing to participate in a rather elaborate piece of theater. The audience would certainly remember the name. Remembering its apostrophe had previously required more concentration.

“It wasn’t really that scary. It was actually very, very fun. I’d do it again.”

Katherine Kostereva, on the 2019 skydiving rebrand

Behind the spectacle was a product argument. Creatio was easier to remember, and the new identity matched the company’s interest in letting customers create applications themselves. The products, people, and underlying strategy continued. The parachutes made the announcement visible; the software still had to make the next working day easier.

A company that can move without her

In February 2021, Creatio announced its first outside financing: $68 million in a minority investment led by Volition Capital, with Horizon Capital participating. The company had reached that point through organic growth. The funding was intended for research and development, sales and marketing, and its international network of partners.

Another round followed in June 2024. Sapphire Ventures led a $200 million investment, joined by StepStone Group and existing investors. The announced valuation was $1.2 billion. A number like that changes the way a company is introduced. It supplies an efficient shorthand for scale, although it says much less about the daily work that produced it.

For Kostereva, a more revealing measure was whether the organization could produce business without her in every sales conversation. A founder can supply urgency and conviction. She cannot indefinitely supply every introduction, explanation, and follow-up. Growth requires people who can act on the idea independently, with systems that support them.

That is a less photogenic milestone than a funding announcement. It also changes the founder’s relationship with success. The achievement becomes visible when other people do the work well. A good week can include conversations she never attended. The company becomes a place where knowledge travels, rather than a queue of decisions outside one office.

By May 2026, she described a global team of 1,000 and annual growth of roughly 40 percent. She also said scaling had made her working days longer. The responsibility had expanded with the organization. Her account offers little support for the idea that reaching a certain valuation earns an entrepreneur a permanent afternoon off.

Freedom comes with a reading list

In 2022, Kostereva co-authored the No-Code Playbook with Burley Kawasaki. The 200-page guide gave a method to an idea often presented as a product demonstration. It addressed how teams deliver applications, allocate responsibilities, and manage the work. A tool can remove a technical obstacle without deciding what an organization should build.

The book’s current second edition extends the method into AI. Its emphasis includes governance, collaboration between business and technical teams, and continuing improvement after an application goes live. These subjects give substance to her recurring word, freedom. Users need enough structure to make their new powers useful to colleagues and customers.

Her own continuing education included Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management program. Her public recommendations include Frank Slootman’s Amp It Up, a business book concerned with expectations, intensity, and execution. There is a recognizable interest running through the choices: how an organization can keep improving as the work and the number of people grow.

Her published advice about risk is similarly practical. Define what a considered risk looks like. Give people time to think. When something fails, examine the decisions without turning the review into a search for someone to punish. Those recommendations put everyday operating habits beneath the much easier instruction to be brave.

The tone can be dry. Asked about entrepreneurial challenges, she joked about the supposed smooth sailing. Elsewhere, she has described growth as something people must pursue daily. The joke and the insistence belong together. The difficulties are familiar enough to laugh about, but they still require a decision, a conversation, or another attempt.

The next person at the desk might be an agent

Her current product vision brings employees and AI agents into the same working system. Creatio’s AI Twin offering lets business users create personal agents without technical expertise. The old question about access to software has acquired another form: who gets to shape an agent’s work, and how does that work fit into the organization?

In August 2026, Creatio announced her inclusion in the Global 100 Women in AI list. Inc. also included her in its 2026 Female Founders 500. These acknowledgments arrive during a shift in the company’s public language toward AI-enabled CRM and automation. The workflow remains central even as the means of carrying it out changes.

On September 22, 2026, Creatio announced a $300 million investment commitment to its Bank.AI platform for 2026 through 2028. The stated plans cover product development, adoption programs, and the partners needed to deploy the technology. It is a forward commitment with a timetable, directed at bringing AI into financial institutions’ customer and operational processes.

The teenage advertising seller had to begin each new conversation herself. The CEO now works on systems through which other people, and increasingly software agents, can act. The distance between those jobs is considerable. The question connecting them is still ordinary enough to ask at a doorway: what would help you get the work done?