CELONIS

Three students at the Technical University of Munich — Alexander Rinke, Bastian Nominacher, and Martin Klenk — were studying how business processes work when they realized that enterprise systems like SAP contain massive event logs that nobody was analyzing. They built software to mine those logs and visualize the actual flow of processes — purchase orders, invoice processing, supply chain movements.

When they showed companies the difference between how processes were supposed to work and how they actually worked, executives were shocked. The gap was always larger than anyone expected.

Process mining and execution management platform. Celonis connects to a company's IT systems (SAP, Oracle, Salesforce), analyzes event logs to visualize exactly how business processes actually work (versus how they're supposed to work), identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies, and automates fixes.

Revenue comes from enterprise software subscriptions (typically $500K-$5M+ per year for large enterprises). The insight: most companies have no idea how their own processes actually function — Celonis shows them.

Celonis Process Mining (visualize actual business processes from IT system data), Celonis Execution Management System (EMS — identify and fix inefficiencies), Process Intelligence (AI-driven insights), Action Engine (automate process improvements), and industry-specific solutions for supply chain, finance, procurement, and IT operations.

Execution management. Celonis evolved from pure process mining (showing problems) to execution management (fixing problems automatically).

The platform now includes AI-powered recommendations and automated actions that fix inefficiencies without human intervention. Expansion from traditional SAP-centric customers to any enterprise with complex processes — healthcare, telecom, logistics.

Land-and-expand within large enterprises: start with one process (accounts payable), prove ROI, then expand to every process in the company.

Explaining what process mining IS. Most executives have never heard of process mining — it's not CRM, ERP, or analytics.

Celonis has to educate the market while simultaneously selling into it. The sales cycle for a $2M enterprise software deal that solves a problem the buyer didn't know they had is long and complex.

Competition from SAP (which has its own process mining tool, Signavio) and other enterprise software giants is intensifying as the category matures.

Accel, Arena Holdings (Ryan Smith), Durable Capital Partners, Franklin Templeton, and T. Rowe Price have backed Celonis.