Celonis Raises Another $1Billion In Funding To Put Company's Value At $11Billion

Enterprise software firm Celonis has raised $1 billion in a new round of funding, valuing the company at an eye-watering $11 billion.

Celonis has raised a billion dollars funding to place its value at $11 billion.

This round of funding was led by Durable Capital Partners, alongside T Rowe Price Associates. Franklin Templeton and Splunk Ventures also took part. This funding puts the company's valuation at $11 billion, a big leap from the $2.5 billion it was valued at just two years ago in 2019.

Founded in 2011 by three college friends; Alex Rinke, Bastian Nominacher, and Markin Klenk in Germany; Celonis was initially a project on helping businesses optimize their IT process. Currently, it has evolved into an enterprise software firm, which prides itself on being a pioneer of “process mining,” which analyzes data from a company’s event logs to identify problems with certain processes. This process mining helps companies detect discrepancies in their operations by looking through reports, invoices, sales logs, and other business records which the company uses for daily operations. Not only does it detect the problems in operations, but a process mining platform also finds possible solutions, making it one of the most sought-after software.

Celonis has revealed that its software is increasingly getting popular as the demand for it increases. Its clientele includes major names like Dell, L’Oreal, and Pfizer. On Wednesday, the tech startup said that it is “growing by triple digits year-over", although specific figures weren't provided. 

This rise in demand for process mining software is closely linked to the company's adoption of robotic process automation (RBA). The RBA simply helps organizations lower operational costs and possibilities of error by using artificial intelligence to automate the tasks that are manually done repeatedly. To do this, the company must first identify the areas it would like to automate, and the Celonis software takes it from there.

 Only last year, Celonis launched "execution management," a new platform that gives clients access to a dashboard highlighting real-time data on operational processes and how to automate these processes.

“As companies grow, inefficiency creeps in and business execution becomes a struggle,” Alex Rinke, co-CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. “Employees feel it, customers feel it, and it leads to significant financial losses and environmental impact.”

“We are thrilled and honored that the rise of execution management is defining a new software stack that helps customers reimagine how they execute,” he added. “It is the biggest shift in software since cloud computing.”

In 2020, Celonis was ranked #39th on the Forbes Cloud 100. In 2019, Celonis was awarded the Gold Stevie Award for "Most Innovative Tech Company of the Year."

This isn't the company's first funding, in June 2016, it closed $27.5M in Series A funding led by 83North and Accel. Two years later in June 2018, Celonis received an additional $50M in Series B funding at a valuation of $1B. The funding round was again led by 83North and Accel. A year later, in November 2019, the company closed $290M in Series C funding at a valuation of $2.5B. The funding round was led by Arena Holdings alongside old investors like 83North, Accel, and a group of principal investors including Ryan Smith and Craig Courtemanche.

After announcing the funding, the company also disclosed that it had appointed Carlos Kirjner, former VP of finance at Google, to be its new chief financial officer as the company prepared for an initial public offering(IPO).