Inside Celonis, the German tech unicorn that won over a fifth of the FTSE 100

For a company valued at more than $13bn (£9.58bn), Celonis remains relatively unknown in Britain.

Founded in Munich in 2011, the software company has become one of Europe’s most valuable private tech firms, with customers including AstraZeneca, ASOS, BMW and the UK Cabinet Office. The UK has become one of its three largest markets globally.

“We’re sort of this unknown brand but with a lot of reach”, Rupal Karia, Celonis’ general manager for Northern Europe and the Middle East, told City AM.

That reach now extends across some of Britain’s largest firms. The Munich-founded software business counts AstraZeneca, ASOS and a growing number of financial institutions among its customers, while its public-sector work includes a Cabinet Office programme designed to streamline government back-office operations.

“There are stories about them having one car and going to customers and having to push the car up the hill,” Karia says of Celonis’ founders.

Fifteen years later, the company those students built is worth more than $13bn and ranks among Europe’s most valuable private tech firms.

“We founded what we call process mining. No one had ever heard of it, we created the category.”

Every large organisation generates enormous amounts of operational data across systems such as SAP, Salesforce, Workday, and Microsoft Outlook.

Celonis analyses that information to show how work actually moves through a business rather than how executives assume it moves.

The company’s earliest customers were German industrial giants, helping explain why Germany remains one of its largest markets.

“Unlike most companies, our biggest business is Germany still,” Karia says. “We’re a household name there. But our three biggest regions are the US, Germany and the UK by far.”

According to Celonis, it has already delivered around $1.5bn of value to UK customers and trained more than 3,200 people through its academy programmes.

The next phase of growth

Like much of the enterprise software industry, Celonis is trying to position itself for a world in which businesses are looking beyond AI pilots and towards practical deployment.

Karia argued many companies have focused on AI tools before understanding the processes those tools are supposed to improve: “Everyone thinks their processes run perfectly. They never do.”

One example came from Celonis’ work with an NHS trust. Hospital managers were considering hiring more doctors and nurses to address capacity constraints, whereas the analysis pointed elsewhere.

“Our analysis found the issue wasn’t doctors and nurses,” Karia said. “They didn’t have enough people cleaning the theatres quickly enough, and they didn’t have enough porters taking people to appointments on time.”

The tech firm sees similar opportunities across government, with one of its early Cabinet Office projects examining security clearance processes, where the average time between a job offer and a new recruit starting work was around nine months.

“We found all these reasons why and all the bottlenecks,” Karia said.

More recently, Celonis announced the acquisition of MIT spinout Ikigai Labs, aiming to bring forecasting and simulation into its platform.

The move comes as the company increasingly finds itself competing in conversations traditionally dominated by larger tech groups.

“We never intended to build a European Palantir,” Karia says. “But it’s sort of been a term which has been falling on us now.”

Celonis has been “very deliberate” in remaining platform-agnostic, integrating with Microsoft’s cloud products, AWS, Databricks and OpenAI rather than tying itself to a single ecosystem.

That independence may prove valuable as governments and businesses become more sensitive about where data sits and who controls it.

Celonis already works with more than 20 FTSE 100 firms, but Karia argued there is plenty of room to expand that footprint. “I feel that could at least be 40 per cent”, he added.