Tampa tech firm nets $75M in private equity capital

Coherent, a global Software-as-a-Service provider headquartered in Tampa, has raised $75 million in its Series B funding round, bringing its total venture capital investment, to date, to $89 million.

According to a news release, the firm’s latest funding round was led by Maverick Capital. Other investors included Owl Rock, GreatPoint Ventures, Cathay Innovation and Franklin Templeton.

Coherent, in the release, says its annual recurring revenue is 10 times what it was in November 2020, when it closed a Series A round. The latest capital injection will help it fund expansion into industries such as insurance, capital markets, banking and asset management, in addition to growing its sales teams in the United States and the Asia-Pacific region.

Spark, one of Coherent’s key products, can automatically convert any business logic within a spreadsheet — such as rules, formulas and data models — into an application programming interface (API) that easily connects to other front- and back-end applications, the release states. The service delivers in minutes what could take months in a typical business software development cycle, freeing up IT teams to focus on innovation.

“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,” Coherent co-founder and CEO John Brisco states in the release. “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.”