Bootstrapping a Decacorn on $15k with Celonis CEO Alexander Rinke

Last week, we sat down with Alex Rinke (https://twitter.com/alexanderrinke), Co-founder & Co-CEO of Celonis, to explore how AI and automation are transforming business operations at large enterprises.

Celonis is the pioneer of "process mining" - the technology that uses graph databases, AI, and automation to analyze processes, find inefficiencies and their root causes, and solve them.

Most recently valued at $13B, Celonis is one of the most valuable startups globally. But Alexander and his two co-founders started Celonis while still in college on a $15,000 budget.

In this conversation, we talked about the early days of Celonis, how Alex acquired his first enterprise clients without inside industry connections, how Celonis navigates go-to-market for a product with an expansive scope, and much more.

CELONIS

Website - https://www.celonis.com

Twitter - https://twitter.com/Celonis

Alex Rinke (Co-Founder & Co-CEO):

Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexanderrinke

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-rinke-10733061/

DATA DRIVEN NYC

This episode of the MAD Podcast was recorded live at Data Driven NYC, an event series organized by FirstMark Capital. The events are free and held monthly in New York, currently with the support of Foursquare.

If you wish to attend and be notified of future events, please follow FirstMark on Eventbrite at https://www.eventbrite.com/o/firstmark-capital-2215570183

00:00 - Intro

02:02 - What is Process Mining?

05:20 - How Celonis got started

07:42 - “We had our first prototype in three weeks”

09:36 - Pivotal partnership with ACP

12:12 - How did Celonis find product-market-people fit?

14:14 - Penetrating the global market

16:19 - Technical deep dive into the Celonis’ product

19:29 - Celonis finds process gaps completely automatically

21:15 - Who is the average user of Celonis inside companies?

22:11 - How Celonis uses Generative AI

24:54 - Acquisition of Symbio

25:56 - How to keep the fire of innovation inside the team?

27:49 - How to bring a very horizontal product to market?

32:24 - Scaling yourself as a leader

34:15 - Glimpse into the future of Celonis

35:37 - Outro