Celonis

Founded in 2011 in Munich by three students from the technical university — Alexander Rinke, Bastian Nominacher and Martin Klenk. The technique is called process mining: instead of asking staff how a workflow is supposed to run, you reconstruct it from timestamped events in systems like SAP and Oracle, then watch, in black and white, where purchase orders stall or invoices get paid too early.

The company became one of Europe's most valuable startups, worth around $13 billion by 2022. The idea predates the firm — researcher Wil van der Aalst described process mining back in the 2000s — but Celonis packaged it as "execution management" for executives who would rather buy a dashboard than read a thesis.