Coherent Raises $75 Million Series B Led by Maverick Capital to Ignite Business Software Development for the Hybrid-Work Era

Coherent, a global no-code software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, announced 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.

Coherent’s annual recurring revenue grew more than 10X and its customer base quadrupled, now stretching over six continents, since the company’s Series A in November 2020. 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. The investment also will 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 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.

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“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,” said John Brisco, CEO and Co-founder of Coherent. “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.”

“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,” Brisco added.

Matt Taloni, Head of Software Engineering at Prudential Financial, said, “We selected Coherent Spark to help drive efficiencies in the way we get our product to market. As we continue to explore emerging business opportunities across new digital platforms, it was imperative we decoupled ourselves from reliance on traditional core systems. Spark gives us the simplicity of Excel with the sophistication of modern API architectures.”

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With over 750 million users, Microsoft Excel is the world’s most pervasive programming language and a ubiquitous business application with 59% of companies using over 1,000 spreadsheets to run critical business operations. Despite this, businesses have struggled to audit, manage, scale, and connect spreadsheets seamlessly to other business applications. Thus, companies end up spending $430 billion globally on business-to-business software and services. Coherent Spark takes the flexibility, functionality, and familiarity of Microsoft Excel and layers on API connectivity to applications, cloud scalability, automated testing, auditability, and many other enterprise-grade capabilities – bringing the best of all worlds to the largest enterprises and one-person companies equally.

“Today’s collaborative business world demands a fresh approach for IT teams to build software in a quick and cost-effective way,” said Andrew Homan, Senior Managing Director at Maverick Capital. “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.”

More than 60 Fortune 500 global insurance companies and banks have already realized significant benefits from Coherent solutions. Furthermore, Coherent continues to amplify its impact with a growing technology and services partner network including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, Cognizant, Capgemini, Capco, and Synpulse amongst others.

“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,” said Albert Koh, Investor at Owl Rock, a Blue Owl division. “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.”

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