Celonis

Celonis is a Munich-headquartered enterprise software company built around process mining: the practice of reconstructing how a business actually runs by reading the event logs its own systems already produce. It was founded in 2011 by three students at the Technical University of Munich - Alexander Rinke, Bastian Nominacher and Martin Klenk - after a consulting project convinced them that the digital exhaust of ERP and CRM systems could be turned into an objective map of a company's order-to-cash, procure-to-pay and supply-chain processes.

The product reads transaction-level data out of systems such as SAP, Oracle, Salesforce and ServiceNow, reconstructs the real sequence of steps behind each business process, and then quantifies where value leaks out: duplicate payments, missed discounts, avoidable expedited freight, rework loops. Celonis calls the resulting layer Process Intelligence, and in May 2026 it packaged it as the Celonis Context Model, positioned as a live operational model that AI agents can query before they act.

The company's commercial position rests on that data layer sitting between customers and their systems of record - which is also the source of its central strategic risk. In March 2025 Celonis sued SAP in the Northern District of California, alleging that SAP had used its dominance in ERP to restrict third-party access to customers' own data after acquiring the process-mining vendor Signavio in 2021. SAP agreed in June 2025 not to interfere with the Celonis extractor while the case runs, and in October 2025 the court allowed most of the antitrust claims through to discovery.

Celonis has raised roughly $1.8 billion of equity across five disclosed rounds, most recently a $400 million Series D extension led by the Qatar Investment Authority in August 2022 at a post-money valuation of close to $13 billion. It has not announced a priced round since. The company reports more than 5,000 enterprise customers and over 3,000 employees across more than 20 offices, and has repeatedly been named an IPO candidate in the European technology press, though it has filed no registration statement and has announced no listing plans.