Martin Klenk | CTO, Celonis | Top 30 EMEA CTOs 2026

Career History

Celonis is a Munich-based enterprise software company offering process mining and execution management tools that give organisations real-time visibility into how their processes run and how they can be optimised. Celonis went from a student project to a $1bn valuation in just seven years, and crossed the $10bn mark within a decade, making it one of Europe’s fastest-growing enterprise software firms. Martin Klenk co-founded Celonis in 2011 and has guided its technology strategy ever since, shaping the product architecture, engineering roadmap and scaling the platform for global enterprise use.

Under Klenk’s direction, Celonis has moved beyond traditional process mining to deeply integrate AI, leveraging the Process Intelligence Graph, AgentC, orchestration tools and platform APIs to drive automation, decision intelligence and process compliance. Recent innovations include AgentC’s extended Process Intelligence API, the no-code GenAI Annotation Builder, general availability of Process Copilots within collaboration tools, and the Orchestration Engine for cross-system workflow automation and monitoring.

Klenk studied Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich.

About Celonis

Founded in 2011 by Martin Klenk along with Alexander Rinke and Bastian Nominacher, Celonis began as a university project and has since become one of Europe’s foremost enterprise software firms. It pioneered the process mining category and now offers a broader execution management system, with a suite of AI-enabled tools.

In August 2022, the company raised a funding round led by the Qatar Investment Authority that pushed its valuation past $13bn, bringing total funding to more than $1.7bn.

Celonis serves over 1,400 enterprise customers globally across industries, helping them recover billions of dollars in lost efficiency and reduce process cycle times dramatically. In 2026, Celonis expanded further into enterprise AI with the launch of its Context Model, designed to give AI agents the business context needed to understand processes and make more informed decisions, while agreeing to acquire AI decision-intelligence company Ikigai Labs.