Celonis Series D

Durable Capital and T. Rowe Price dumped a billion dollars into enterprise process mining software in June 2021 at an $11B valuation and I need you to understand how completely fucking unhinged that sentence is. Celonis does process mining—basically they help corporations figure out why their SAP implementations are disasters by visualizing workflow inefficiencies. It's useful! It's real! It's also the kind of thing that in any rational market would maybe, MAYBE justify a $2B valuation if you were being extremely generous and the founders had photos of every major CIO in compromising positions. But $11B? That's more than we valued actual infrastructure companies that keep the internet running. This is what happens when crossover funds have too much dry powder and not enough therapy.

The timing here is the chef's kiss of late-stage venture stupidity—June 2021, peak ZIRP madness, SPACs everywhere, everyone confusing revenue multiples with actual value creation. Celonis was reportedly doing something like $300M ARR at this point, which means investors paid roughly 37x revenue. For enterprise software. For PROCESS MINING. I've seen SaaS companies with better unit economics and faster growth get valued at 15x and feel grateful. The comparable here is what, exactly? UiPath's catastrophic public debut a month earlier should have been the canary in the coal mine, but no—let's take that same playbook of "automation software with questionable margins" and just run it back harder.

The investor quality signals are honestly fascinating in how perfectly they capture 2021's delusion. These aren't traditional enterprise VCs who've been in the trenches—these are public market crossover funds doing late-stage tourism, treating private companies like growth stocks with extra steps. Durable Capital Partners, founded in 2019, was barely old enough to have a track record. T. Rowe Price was out here playing venture capitalist like it's a hobby you pick up during a pandemic. There's no Sequoia grounding this, no Benchmark bringing sanity. Just fresh capital chasing momentum in a sector they probably learned about from a Gartner Magic Quadrant two months before signing the term sheet. The whole cap table screams "we'll figure out the fundamentals later."

The exit math makes me want to scream into a pillow. To justify an $11B valuation, Celonis needs to IPO at what, $15B minimum for the late-stage investors to look competent? $20B to actually return meaningful multiples? Show me the path where process mining software commands that kind of public market enthusiasm in 2024 or 2025 or whenever they finally attempt liquidity. The competitive moat isn't nearly as deep as they think—you've got IBM, SAP themselves building native analytics, a dozen smaller competitors eating the mid-market. Meanwhile, the macro environment has completely evaporated for "nice to have" enterprise software that promises ROI in eighteen months after a painful implementation. CFOs are cutting SaaS spend, not expanding it. This deal will age like milk in the sun.