Celonis began as a company to help customers understand how work flowed through their company by building a process map. This was valuable in itself, but the next logical step was to not only analyze the processes, but find ways to make them more efficient. Today, the company announced it has acquired Czech startup Integromat to help speed up the automation side of the house, which they started building into the platform last year.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Celonis co-founder and CEO Alexander Rinke said the deal was over $100 million. “It was a three-digit amount of over $100 million. We can’t disclose the exact price, but we’re just giving this range,” he said. The deal has already closed.
Rinke describes Integromat as an enterprise version of Zapier, one that has been quite successful, building a $10 million business with more than 11,000 customers, and it will help the company automate processes across applications, something that is difficult to do.
“They really develop what I believe is a disruptive approach to automation. And obviously it’s very important for us because we are we looking to expand our product from being primarily a process mining tool that is focused on surfacing the insights as to how processes executed today, and evolve that into what we call an execution management system, which is on an ongoing basis really helping you to optimize the execution of your key processes,” Rinke explained.
Rinke says that every company has a key set of operations, and if you can begin to automate across these systems, as Integromat enables them to do now, you can begin to squeeze out ways to make your business more efficient through automation.
“We believe that there needs to be a layer that comes in on top of that [key set of operations] to first of all understand what’s going on, measure the capacity that organizations execute with today, measure where the biggest gaps are and where the capacity is trapped, and then also unleash that automation. This is an important piece because when you figure that out, you ideally want to automate as much as possible,” he said.
Integromat’s 60 employees will become part of Celonis, but Rinke says the company’s technology will be both incorporated into the Celonis platform and continue to service current customers as a separate standalone product, which has to be good news for those customers.
Celonis launched in 2011 and has raised more than $364 million. It raised $290 million last November on a valuation of $2.5 billion. Integromat was launched in 2012 and has not raised any money. Both company’s financial information is according to PitchBook.