Celonis relies on money from Qatar: "We have strong ethical standards"

Sometimes Bastian Nominacher himself can hardly believe how the company he co-founded eleven years ago is going through the roof.

Celonis relies on money from Qatar: "We have strong ethical standards"

Sometimes Bastian Nominacher himself can hardly believe how the company he co-founded eleven years ago is going through the roof. Celonis is now considered the most valuable German startup - also thanks to a capital injection from Qatar, as Nominacher explains in the ntv podcast "So techt Deutschland".

With a valuation of 13 billion US dollars, Celonis is the most valuable start-up in Germany, even if the software company is now a thing of the past: The Munich-based company is already eleven years old, but sees itself only at the beginning. "We have only developed one percent of the market," says co-CEO Bastian Nominacher in the ntv podcast "So techt Deutschland". He doesn't see the end of this growth as yet: "The amount of data quadruples or quintuples every year. There's still a lot to do."

Celonis helps other companies to identify processes that consume too much effort and therefore money. The core of the so-called "Process Mining" is software that works with artificial intelligence, which examines data and processes and then shows ways and means of reducing costs by up to 30 percent.

In order to be able to win new customers and improve its own products, Celonis is always looking for financially strong investors. In the last round of financing, Nominacher's management team was also able to win over the Qatari sovereign wealth fund as a donor - the right decision, as he explains in "So techt Deutschland".

"What convinced us is the strong track record in the area of ​​cooperation with industrial and technology companies," Nominacher confirms the step, i.e. the track record of the Qatari sovereign wealth fund. So it was a purely business decision that would currently make football fans in particular turn their noses up at the human rights situation in the country? Not for Celonis: "We have very, very strong ethical standards," says Nominacher: "Be it in the area of ​​human rights, be it in the area of ​​sustainability and the like."

It is also an opportunity for the Qatari sovereign wealth fund to invest in the future. Thanks to Celonis, the new partner can divert its resources "from an economy that is very strongly characterized by gas production, oil and the like" to new technologies, emphasizes the company founder. When selecting investors, the decisive factor for him is that they have a long-term orientation and that they understand the software business well. "That's why we see a partnership that we can build together."

In the new episode of "So techt Deutschland", Bastian Nominacher explains what Celonis intends to do with the investments, why the company says it is still "at the very beginning" and whether an IPO is imminent.