Fifteen hundred handwritten letters. That was the sales team at Celonis in its first months: three students, a pile of envelopes, and a theory that a receptionist will bin a printed letter but hesitate over a handwritten one.
The three were Alexander Rinke, Bastian Nominacher and Martin Klenk, all at Munich universities and all working through a student consultancy called Academy Consult. In 2011 it sent them to Bayerischer Rundfunk, the Bavarian broadcaster, where some internal processes took up to five days. They watched how work actually moved. Then, in their student dorm, they wrote simple software that did one thing: measure the gaps between timestamps. The biggest gaps showed where work was stuck.
What almost nobody sees behind that tidy story is how little of a company it was.
They presented the result on a few sheets of A4. The broadcaster loved it. Processes that had taken five days fell to a few hours.
What almost nobody sees behind that tidy story is how little of a company it was. Rinke, who a BBC piece says started his first business at 15 by tutoring school pupils, had a product nobody could easily describe. Investors, he and the others have recalled, called it too difficult to understand and too complex. So Celonis stayed bootstrapped. Even the name nearly went wrong: the founders weighed Zelos, after the Greek spirit of zeal, and Zelonis, then dropped the latter because it would sit at the end of every alphabetical list. They settled on Celonis just before the notary appointment.
That is where the letters came in. Without money for marketing, they wrote to chief executives by hand. Siemens followed the broadcaster as a customer, partly through that campaign.
The turn came through a very German doorway. In 2012 Celonis joined SAP's Startup Focus programme, and in 2015 it signed a reseller deal with SAP, putting its software in front of the people who ran the world's corporate back offices. Venture money finally came: US$27.5m in 2016, then a billion-dollar valuation in 2018, and US$290m the next year. In 2019 the three received the German Future Prize.
The price of success has been dependence. The channel that carried Celonis to big companies belongs to a company that now sells competing tools, and the founders have spent years making their product stand on its own, with acquisitions such as Integromat in 2020.
By 2021 an US$1bn round valued the company at US$11bn; a 2022 extension led by Qatar's sovereign fund pushed that to about US$13bn. Today it has around 3,000 employees.
The lesson is not about process mining. When no one will fund an idea they cannot understand, show them one small number on one sheet of paper, and if nobody answers the phone, write by hand.