(Image source: Coherent webpage.)
Coherent, a Tampa, Fla.-based global no-code software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider to the insurance industry and other verticals, has announced its closing of 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 reports that its annual recurring revenue has grown more than 10X and its customer base has quadrupled while extending geographically across six continents, since the company’s Series A in November 2020. The company reports that this funding round—which brings its total capital raised to $89 million—will support its continuing mission to the global insurance industry while also supporting expansion in new industry verticals, including capital markets, banking, and asset management. The company says the current round of funding will 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.
John Brisco, CEO and Co-founder, Coherent.
Coherent describes its Spark solution as automatically converting any business logic within a spreadsheet—such as rules, formulas, and data models—into an API that can easily connect to other front- and back-end applications. Coherent asserts that 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, the vendor says.
“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,” comments John Brisco, CEO and co-founder, 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.”
Decoupling from Reliance on Legacy Core Systems
Matt Taloni, Head of Software Engineering, Prudential Financial.
Prudential Financial selected Coherent Spark to help drive efficiencies in the way the insurer gets product to market, according to Matt Taloni, the company’s Head of Software Engineering. “As we continue to explore emerging business opportunities across new digital platforms, it was imperative we decoupled ourselves from reliance on traditional core systems,” Taloni comments. “Spark gives us the simplicity of Excel with the sophistication of modern API architectures.”
To explain the utility of Spark, Coherent notes that, with over 750 million users, Microsoft Excel is the world’s most pervasive programming language and a ubiquitous business application with 59 percent of companies using over 1,000 spreadsheets to run critical business operations. Despite this, the vendor says, 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 explains that 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, which the vendor characterizes as 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,” comments Andrew Homan, Senior Managing Director, 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.”
Over 600 Fortune 500 Insurance and Banking Clients
Coherent reports that over than 60 Fortune 500 global insurance companies and banks have already realized significant benefits from Coherent solutions. The company says it 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,” comments Albert Koh, Investor at Owl Rock. “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.”
Coherent, Unqork Partner on Advanced Insurance Applications, Logic and Services