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
[email protected]
The Broadsheet is Coins2Day’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Gender disparity. Only 6% of chief executive officers around the world are women, according to a report from Deloitte. Globally, around 23% of board seats are filled by women, and 8.4% of boards have female chairs. Global gender parity for CEOs may not be reached until 2111. Fast Company
- EV pullback. GM, led by CEO Mary Barra, is delaying the start of production at an Indiana battery plant until 2027 in GM's latest pull back of its all-electric plans. Barra says the automaker will still meet that objective, albeit on a slower timeline. Wall Street Journal
- Got it covered. Aetna, a company under the umbrella of CVS Health and CEO Karen Lynch, is the first major health insurer to include intrauterine insemination (IUI) in its coverage as a medical benefit. IUI helps people struggling with infertility, which affects one in six people globally. Coins2Day
- Women in STEM. For the first time in 133 years, more than half of the incoming undergraduate class at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, are women; the university began admitting women in 1970. The incoming class welcomes 113 women and 109 men. Los Angeles Times
MOVERS AND SHAKERS
Hearst Magazines named Willa Bennett editor in chief of Cosmopolitan and Seventeen. Most recently, she was editor in chief of Highsnobiety.
Wrike, a work management platform, appointed Jacquelyn Tonelli as chief financial officer. Previously, she was CFO at NetWitnes.
AEX Convention Services, an event production company, appointed Kristin Christensen as executive vice president of sales and marketing. Most recently, she was chief marketing officer at Hexagon.
Mindr, a substance detection, monitoring, and safety technology company, appointed Karen Sisson as senior vice president of government affairs. Most recently, she was head of strategy advocacy for global government affairs and enterprise risk management at 3M Company.
Purchasing Power, a voluntary benefit company, named Hannah McPhaul as regional sales director. Most recently, McPhaul was a regional sales representative for Ameritas.
ON MY RADAR
How TikTok turned Starface’s pimple patches into a beauty obsession Bloomberg
The conversation we should be having around It Ends With Us The Cut
How Aubrey Plaza eye-rolled her way to Hollywood stardom Wall Street Journal
PARTING WORDS
“Everyone is someone’s sister, and to really care about the players you coach, to really care about the people you work with... Is the most important thing.”
— Tara VanDerveer, former head women’s basketball coach at Stanford University, on the importance of trust within a team
