By Douglas Busvine
BERLIN -German based software company Celonis has raised $1 billion from investors to give the company a post-fundraising valuation of more than $11 billion, extending a record-stretching series of mega funding rounds by German technology startups.
Munich-based Celonis, founded a decade ago, has consistently doubled revenue from year to year and recently launched its Execution Management System product that crunches data to tackle problems and automate decision making.
The Celonis fundraising raise follows recent bumper rounds by online stockbroker Trade Republic, online insurer Wefox, and another Munich startup FlixMobility, which on Wednesday said it had raised $650 million.
On top of the Series D venture round, a record for a German technology startup, Celonis said it was hiring veteran Wall Street analyst and Google executive Carlos Kirjner to become its chief financial officer.
Celonis initially developed and marketed process-mining software that enabled clients to analyse swathes of data thrown off by modern company operations and find ways to improve their business processes.
It rebranded as an Execution Management platform after acquiring Czech peer Integromat last year, and will invest proceeds of the fundraising in enabling its software to give better recommendations and take smarter decisions. [L8N2H54WX]
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"We have taken the round to accelerate the trend," co-CEO and co-founder Bastian Nominacher told Reuters in an interview, saying Celonis would focus on making its software more "intelligent and actionable".
Celonis cited a report from Spark Matrix, which forecast that the global process-mining market would grow at an average annual rate of more than 75% through 2025, when it is expected to be worth $7.1 billion.
It competes with business software group SAP, which recently took over Signavio, a Berlin-based business process intelligence startup, and is promoting it as part of its vision of the cloud-native "intelligent enterprise".
New Celonis investors Durable Capital Partners LP and T. Rowe Price Associates co-led the round.
“Celonis uniquely sits at the center of one of the biggest technology trends of our time - modernizing businesses with data-driven and intelligent execution,” said Henry Ellenbogen, managing partner and chief investment officer of Durable Capital Partners.
Nominacher said Celonis was seeing huge demand for its services, citing the case of GE Healthcare which he said was able to improve its free cashflow by $1.3 billion with the help of its technology.
Celonis has also teamed up with IBM, whose Global Business Services arm is weaving its execution management software into the service offering from its front-line team of consultants.
