The co-head of Celonis has just completed his fourth acquisition: PAF with 40 employees now belongs to the Munich company.
(Photo: German Future Prize)
Dusseldorf The Munich-based data management company Celonis is buying the Darmstadt-based company Process Analytics Factory for $100 million. This gives the most valuable German start-up access to millions of Microsoft users. “We are bringing Celonis to where people are already working every day,” says Co-CEO Bastian Nominacher. This should succeed with the integration into the Microsoft Power Platform.
Celonis and Process Analytics Factory (PAF) initially started in the same segment: Process Mining. The term is based on mining, where mineral resources are extracted from the mines. Similarly, process mining is about retrieving and preparing data.
Specifically, it is about software that companies can use to visualize and analyze their processes such as purchasing and sales. Companies like Siemens, Edeka and Hypo-Vereinsbank use Celonis to improve their processes.
Celonis quickly set itself apart from its competitors. With many millions of euros in venture capital, the company quickly opened up new markets – both geographically and technologically. With major customers mainly from Europe and North America, the company has now grown to 2500 employees. Today, Celonis also offers simulations and automation in the process flow, for example.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
In these segments, the German start-up is increasingly competing with providers of so-called software robots. In a kind of app store, customers can book corresponding programs, develop them themselves and in turn distribute them.
The 40-employee company PAF, on the other hand, has further specialized in process mining and focused on the integration into various Microsoft applications.
The integration into the Microsoft environment, which many employees use anyway, appeals to a broader group of customers. A segment in which Celonis, which is expected to go public in the foreseeable future, promises growth potential. Even within the company, more users should be able to access Celonis offers directly.
Celonis wants to open up a new customer group
So far, Celonis has been more of an offer for specialists. Relatively few strategists work directly on the proprietary platform, the Celonis Execution Management System (EMS). That is about to change: “Hundreds of employees in a company often use Celonis directly via the EMS, but several thousand work with the Power Platform from Microsoft,” says Celonis boss Nominacher.
According to the company, more than 260,000 companies worldwide, 97 percent of the Fortune 500 and thus more than ten million business users work with the Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft 365 every day.
If you also use the software from PAFnow, you can import data, create graphics and compare them – similar to the well-known spreadsheet program Excel. For example, employees from Merck, Daimler and Viessmann already use the process analysis tools from PAF.
>> Read here: Valuation exceeds ten billion dollars: Munich start-up Celonis is the first German decacorn
In the future, access to the entire Celonis portfolio will be possible: users who have identified the causes of production problems at a supplier can request alternative suppliers from there. Results from analyzes and simulations should be able to be shared directly with colleagues via the Teams communication program.
The Celonis co-founder did not want to comment on the sales potential of the latest acquisition. However, he indicated that Celonis is aiming for integrations into other corporate environments.
According to Gartner analysts, the growing global market for process mining is expected to exceed one billion dollars in the current year. The hyper-automation software market, which Celonis is also targeting, is projected to reach nearly $860 billion by 2025.
PAF is the fourth acquisition for the German record start-up
Venture capitalists see a lot of potential in Celonis, which helped develop the market and has established itself as a market leader. In a round of financing in early summer last year, investors put the company’s value at $11.1 billion (9.1 billion euros). Nominacher and his co-founders Alexander Rinke and Martin Klenk hold the record among German start-ups with the company that started in 2011.
After the acquisitions of Lenses.io last year, Integromat in 2020 and Banyas in 2019, the PAF team will also belong to Celonis in the future. The PAF founder and CEO Tobias Rother and head of technology Timo Nolle will continue to look after the topics related to Microsoft Power BI. The location in Darmstadt will remain.
More: Like an X-ray machine for business processes: This is how Celonis became the German record start-up.