German process mining startup Celonis raises $50 million at a $1 billion valuation

Munich-founded startup Celonis has raised a funding round of $50 million from its existing investors, Accel and 83North. The deal values Celonis at $1 billion and brings the total amount raised by the company to $77.5 million.

Founded in 2011, Celonis specialises in process mining, which is a kind of big data analytics aimed at visualising and making sense of enterprise business processes, including core operations like logistics, production and finance. This way, the company claims, customers can see inefficiencies in the processes, as well as go through transformation initiatives in a less expensive and time-consuming way.

Celonis states that it has grown 5,000 percent over the past four years and 300 percent in the past year. It also claims to have been profitable every year since its inception.

After the previous funding round in 2016, Celonis opened an office in New York, followed by Boston, Raleigh, and Miami. The company's sales force in the US has grown tenfold in the past year, it stated in a press release. The US is the fastest-growing region for Celonis, expected to soon account for more than 50 percent of its revenues.

Celonis is planning to use the money to fuel its European expansion, starting from the UK. It has already hired two senior salespeople in the country in 2018, and the plan is to extend the team there to 10 employees by mid-2019. The company already has major clients in the UK, including Vodafone, AstraZeneca, and Transport for London (TfL).