Celonis secures another $1 billion to find and fix process issues in enterprise systems

Lest there be any doubt that some startups are soaring even amid macroeconomic uncertainty, process mining software provider Celonis announced today he secured a whopping $1 billion in additional capital to $13 billion after silver valuation, a combination of equity ($400 million) and debt (a $600 million line of credit). dollars over five years). Technically an extension of Celonis' Series D, the infusion brings the late-stage startup's total capital raised to $2.4 billion.

Now one of Germany's most important private companies and one of New York's most important startups (with offices in Munich and New York), Celonis started as a university project there about 11 years old. Alex Rinke, Bastian Nominacher, and Martin Klenk started the company as a spin-off from the Technical University of Munich, and in 2012 Celonis joined the SAP Startup Focus program, an accelerator for analytics startups creating new applications on the SAP HANA platform.< /p>

Process mining can (but not always) be part of robotic process automation, or RPA, which aims to automate monotonous, repetitive tasks traditionally performed by human workers using software. Process mining involves finding the root causes of problems by extracting data from systems, including desktops, computing, messaging applications, and workflows. It paves the way for RPA to capture tasks, which happens when RPA users walk through a process they want to automate.

Like other process mining technologies, Celonis uses automated actions to find process issues inside business systems. But it also goes the extra mile by attempting to fix process issues automatically without requiring users to tamper with the underlying systems.

Major RPA vendors have invested in the development of Process Mining. Automation Anywhere rival UiPath developed some of its own tools before buying Process Gold and StepShot for their process mining capabilities. IBM recently acquired process mining software company MyInvenio. Meanwhile, Blue Prism has launched a task mining solution called Capture, while other vendors, including ABBYY and Nintext-owned Kryon, are slowly expanding their own process mining offerings.

Celonis, clearly benefiting from the heightened interest in process mining, claims to currently have over 2,500 enterprise deployments worldwide; works with 10,000 consultants and 2,000 consulting firms and technology partners (including IBM, Accenture, PWC, KPMG and ServiceNow); and has graduated over 100,000 "practitioners" from its certification program.

"Since the early days of Celonis, we've built a business that operates on strong fundamentals, unchanging customer value, and the kind of resilience that operates at the highest level in any economic environment," said Nominacher , who is CEO. of Celonis, says. “These fundamentals are what put Celonis in such a unique position to lean into the wind, while others lean back. With $1 billion in additional liquidity, Celonis will have maximum flexibility to innovate aggressively, take advantage of new market opportunities and expand our market leadership. »

The Qatar Investment Authority, Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, led the new investment in Celonis. Other participants include Activant Capital, Arena Holdings, T. Rowe Price, Franklin Templeton, Durable Capital Partners, TCV, 83North, Accel Partners and Sator Grove. Celonis says the new funds will be invested in product development, customer acquisition and general market expansion.