Process mining in the student dorm
Three students, a consulting project at Bavarian Broadcasting, and an idea that would change their lives. This is how the success story of Bastian Nominacher, Alexander Rinke, and Martin Klenk began in 2011. Fourteen years later, Celonis is an international company with 3,000 employees and a valuation of 13 billion US dollars.
In 2011, Academy Consult, a student management consultancy from Munich’s universities, sent the three friends on an IT project to Bavarian Broadcasting. The problem there was that processes within the media house could take up to five days to complete. Nominacher, Rinke, and Klenk examined the workflows on site and quickly saw a solution for the excessively long cycle times. Back in their student dorm, the three sat down at their computer and developed simple software that measured the intervals between two timestamps. Wherever the largest gap appeared, processes were slowed down and needed adjustment. For the first time, software was created to visualize and analyze real IT processes. With this, they laid the technological foundation for what is known today as process mining: a data-driven method that allows companies to objectively analyze workflows and uncover optimization potential. Printed on a few sheets of A4 paper, the three presented their results to Bavarian Broadcasting. The response was immediate enthusiasm. Processes that previously took five days now took just a few hours.
Energized by their first project, the three students worked diligently on their own company. But what should it be called? Zelos, a figure from Greek mythology embodying “zeal,” was one suggestion. But the name seemed somehow too short. Zelonis sounded better. However, that would put them at the end of the alphabet. Just before the notary appointment, the founders settled on Celonis with a C instead of a Z.
However, investor outreach was slow. Too difficult to understand, too complex was often the feedback. So Celonis initially remained bootstrapped. Siemens quickly became a customer alongside Bavarian Broadcasting, in part because the three diligently wrote to CEOs. Handwritten letters, no less. 1,500 such letters landed on the desks of major companies. The thinking behind it: handwritten letters don’t get thrown away by reception as easily.
Success proved them right. Today, three-quarters of DAX companies count among Celonis’s major customers. To date, Celonis customers have realized value of more than 8.8 billion US dollars and identified total value of over 18 billion US dollars. Deutsche Telekom achieved over 66 million euros in savings through optimization of its procure-to-pay processes. HP Inc. identified more than one billion US dollars in additional cash flow potential.
Celonis established process mining as a new technology category and has continuously advanced it: from purely retrospective analysis to a process intelligence platform. Today, the platform links event data with business context, industry-specific knowledge, and AI capabilities – and continuously generates actionable insights and automated recommendations. Beyond that, it initiates concrete measures.
Happy endings
Since November 2022, Celonis has enabled Object-Centric Process Mining (OCPM) for the first time, providing a multidimensional view of all business processes and the factors and dependencies associated with them. This makes it possible to capture the entire spectrum of inefficiencies and potential across various processes.
With the Process Intelligence Graph (PI-Graph) introduced in 2023, Celonis has evolved its platform into a process intelligence solution. The PI-Graph unites event data across systems, machine learning (ML), and expertise from thousands of customer projects – and provides a objective, system-independent digital twin of enterprise processes.
The PI-Graph forms the heart of the Celonis platform: it identifies optimization potential, prioritizes measures by business impact, and provides the context for AI-driven automation. As an open, continuously learning database, the PI-Graph makes process knowledge available across the enterprise and enables previously unattainable, context-based understanding of business operations. In doing so, it becomes the backbone for successful AI initiatives.
Celosphere 2025 and the return on AI
Bastian Nominacher, Alexander Rinke, and Martin Klenk have grown a decacorn from a student idea over the course of 14 years. Celonis is recognized worldwide as a technology pioneer in process mining and process intelligence and has received numerous awards for it. In 2019, the three founders received the German Future Prize, the Federal President’s Prize for Technology and Innovation.
The secret to success: constant change and continuous optimization of their own software. This year’s Celosphere motto is: “Return on AI”.
“We keep seeing companies struggle to achieve a return on investment from their AI investments. One of the main reasons: they treat enterprise AI like conventional technology. But it’s a strategic discipline aimed at integrating AI into all business processes. That’s exactly what we support our customers with, together with our partners. We give AI the context it needs. We help our customers deploy it where it creates real value. And we make sure AI works seamlessly with everything they do,”
says Alexander Rinke, co-CEO and co-founder of Celonis, in his keynote.
