Celonis today closed a $290 million series C round for its solution that uses AI-driven data and process mining to make companies more efficient. This round raised the company’s valuation to $2.5 billion. Today’s news follows a $50 million funding round in June 2018 that was led by Accel and 83North and raised Celonis’ valuation to $1 billion.
Celonis sits on top of existing enterprise IT systems from companies like SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce. It then analyzes processes and spots ways to improve efficiency and productivity. The service targets finance, supply chain, IT, sales, and customer service operations and is currently being used by companies like Airbus, 3M, Lufthansa, L’Oréal, Siemens, and Uber.
The funding will be used to grow Celonis’ sales and marketing operations, particularly in the U.S., and to expand the Celonis platform and automate more actions based on its recommendations. When Celonis started, CEO Alexander Rinke told VentureBeat in a phone interview, it was primarily about delivering insights.
“Celonis would tell you ‘Here are the bottlenecks, and here’s where you’re too slow, and here’s where you can speed up.’ And we are increasingly expanding on that and building the action to improve the results [in] the Celonis product so that it doesn’t stop at the insight — it also gives you the action to improve things right away,” Rinke said. “Then it becomes this thing that you put on top of a process and … two months later it runs 30-40% more efficiently.”
Expansion of the Celonis platform will first focus on finance, supply chain, and customer service, Rinke said.
The $290 million funding round was led by Arena Holdings, with participation from a set of principal investors and entrepreneurs, including Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith and Procore founder Tooey Courtemanche.
Celonis now has nearly 800 employees. The company is based in Munich, Germany and New York City and has raised $370 million since it launched in 2011.
Author: Khari Johnson
Source: Venturebeat
