Process mining in the student dormitory
Three students, a consulting project at Bavarian Broadcasting, and an idea that would change their lives. That's how the success story of Bastian Nominacher, Alexander Rinke, and Martin Klenk began in 2011. Fourteen years later... Celonis an international company with 3,000 employees and a value of 13 billion US dollars.
In 2011, Academy Consult, the student-run management consultancy of Munich's universities, sent three friends to Bavarian Broadcasting (Bayerischer Rundfunk) for an IT project. The broadcaster was facing a problem where processes within the media company could take up to five days. Nominacher, Rinke, and Klenk examined the workflows on-site and quickly identified a solution to the excessively long lead times. Back in their student apartments, the three sat down at their computers and developed a simple software program that measured the intervals between two timestamps. Processes slowed down where the interval was greatest and needed to be adjusted. This marked the first time software was created for visualizing and analyzing real-world IT processes. They thus laid the technological foundation for what is now known as process mining: a data-driven method for objectively analyzing business processes and uncovering optimization potential. Printed out on a few sheets of A4 paper, the three presented their findings to Bavarian Broadcasting. The broadcaster was immediately impressed. Processes would no longer take five days, but only a few hours.
Fueled by their first order, the three students are working diligently on their own company. But what should it be called? Zelos, a figure from Greek mythology who embodies "zeal," one of them suggests. But the name is somehow too short. Zelonis sounds better. But that would put them at the very end of the alphabet. Shortly before the notary appointment, the founders agree on Celonis with a C instead of a Z.
But the search for investors is progressing slowly. The feedback is often too difficult to understand and too complex. So it remains to be seen. Celonis Initially bootstrapped, Siemens quickly joined the BR (Bayerischer Rundfunk) as a client, partly because the three founders diligently wrote to CEOs. And they did so by hand. 1,500 such letters landed at the large companies. The idea behind it: handwritten letters are less likely to be thrown away by the secretary.
Their success proves them right. Three-quarters of the DAX-listed companies are now among Celonis's major customers. To date, Celonis customers have realized added value of more than US$8.8 billion and identified a total value of over US$18 billion. Deutsche Telekom achieved savings of over €66 million by optimizing its procure-to-pay processes. HP Inc. identified more than US$1 billion in additional cash flow potential.
Celonis established process mining as a new technological category and has consistently developed it further: from purely retrospective analysis to a platform for process intelligence. Today, the platform links event data with business context, industry-specific knowledge, and AI functionalities – continuously generating actionable insights and automated recommendations. Furthermore, it initiates concrete actions.
Happy without end
Since November 2022, the Celonis, with its Object-Centric Process Mining (OCPM) capability, has enabled for the first time a multidimensional view of all business processes and their associated factors and dependencies. This allows the full spectrum of inefficiencies and potential improvements to be captured across the various processes.
With the Process Intelligence Graph (PI-Graph), introduced in 2023, Celonis further developed its platform into a process intelligence solution. The PI-Graph combines event data, machine learning (ML), and experiential knowledge from thousands of customer projects across systems – and uses this to provide an objective, system-independent digital twin of business processes.
The PI-Graph forms the core of the Celonis platform: It identifies optimization potential, prioritizes measures based on business impact, and provides the context for AI-driven automation. As an open, continuously learning database, the PI-Graph makes process knowledge accessible company-wide, enabling an unprecedented, context-based understanding of business processes. This makes it the backbone for successful AI initiatives.
Celosphere 2025 and the Return on AI
Bastian Nominacher, Alexander Rinke, and Martin Klenk have developed a decacorn from a student idea over the course of 14 years. The Celonis is considered a global technological leader in the field of process mining and process intelligence and has received numerous awards. In 2019, the three founders received the German Future Prize, the Federal President's award for technology and innovation.
The secret to success: constant change and continuous optimization of their own software. The motto at this year's Celosphere is: "Return on AI".
“We repeatedly observe that companies struggle to achieve a return on investment from their AI investments. One of the main reasons is that they view enterprise AI as a conventional technology. However, it is a strategic discipline with the goal of integrating AI into all business processes. This is precisely where we support our clients, together with our partners. We provide AI with the context it needs. We help our clients deploy it where it creates real added value. And we ensure that AI works seamlessly with everything they do.”
says Alexander Rinke, Co-CEO and co-founder of Celonis, in his keynote.
