Bastian Nominacher studied at the Technical University of Munich. Through the student consultancy Academy Consult he met Alexander Rinke and Martin Klenk, and in 2011 the three took a project at Bayerischer Rundfunk, where some internal processes took up to five days.
The three wrote software that did one thing: it measured the time gaps between timestamps. The results showed where work stalled. That tool became Celonis, a name the founders picked over Zelos and Zelonis just before the notary appointment.
Investors found the idea too hard to grasp, so the company stayed bootstrapped from 2011 to 2013. The founders wrote about 1,500 handwritten letters to company chiefs. In 2012 Celonis joined the SAP Startup Focus programme, and in 2015 it signed an SAP reseller agreement.
Funding followed: a Series A in June 2016, unicorn status in 2018 and the German Future Prize in 2019. The August 2022 round valued Celonis at about $13 billion. Nominacher is co-CEO next to Rinke.