Baking bread is hard work. Every morning at 6am, customers are looking for delicious products to start their day. Margins are small and competition is fierce (there are plenty of people making mediocre rolls). Demand is volatile but predictable, such as the morning rush, the lunch rush, and the commute home. If you are poorly prepared for Christmas, you run the risk of fumbling through the most profitable time of the year.
Bastian Nominacher, co-founder of Celonis, the European AI unicorn, comes from a family of bakers from Munich, Germany. A computer game enthusiast, he ended up helping his father run a five-generation business more efficiently using new digital technology.
“I mainly helped with store sales,” Nominacher told me. “In the baking industry, demand spikes, and the highest demand is at Christmas because everyone buys everything and the last thing you want is to run out.”
“Now that we’ve collected the data, we know really well. We can’t just say, ‘Let’s make 10,000 rolls,’ because the margins aren’t that high. Because if you throw away 2,000 rolls, that’s a shame because, first of all, it’s good food. But it also kills the margins. So we got the data, and we were really good and accurate and able to understand the demand patterns. We achieved a very low wastage rate.”
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Celonis ranks in Fortune Future 50
In the 1980s, Warren Buffett said that the key to business success is not moonshots or notable new product launches. Rather, success has come from doing the basics well and finding simple efficiencies along the way.
For many Fortune 500 companies, the advice of the sages of Omaha is well-received. More than 25% of Fortune 500 companies are Celonis customers who use agent AI to find better ways to bake bread.
Celonis is a “process mining” company that maps every step of a company’s business to discover overlapping priorities, human and technical failure points, and inefficiencies. It was valued at $13 billion in 2022 after a $1 billion Series D funding round. Founded in 2011, the company is often talked about as the next big European tech IPO.
“In Europe today, most of the demand is in the supply chain, which is under enormous pressure, first with coronavirus, then with tariffs, and now with the Strait of Hormuz.”
Bastian Nominacher, European AI Unicorn, Co-Founder of Celonis
To explain what Celonis does, Nominacher talks about brewing companies that don’t get the basics right.
“They were having trouble delivering to supermarkets and bars. Very often deliveries were delayed, which is bad because it loses revenue and erodes customer confidence,” he says.
Celonis analyzed the brewery’s 5,000 daily deliveries and came up with a way to make them more efficient, reducing the number of trips by 17%.
“We have increased revenue and improved customer satisfaction. We have also reduced costs because we need less fuel. We have also reduced emissions by more than 10%.”
This is what Celonis calls the “top line, bottom line, green line” effect of process mining: increased revenue, reduced costs, and reduced environmental impact. In 2025, Thelonis was ranked #3 on the Fortune Future 50 list.
“In Europe today, most of the demand is in the supply chain, because supply chains are under huge pressure, first with coronavirus, then with tariffs, and now with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz,” he says.
“It’s clear that the economy is not doing well in many countries and businesses need to open up the economy.” [savings] And if you do it right, you can easily find double or triple digit millions. Macroeconomic pressures really help create transparency. ”
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The Software-as-a-Service space is under pressure, with many arguing that the highly agentic AI being sold will ultimately mean the end of the traditional SaaS commercial model. AI-enabled coding within the enterprise will destroy value in this area.
When asked about the $1 trillion drop in SaaS-listed stocks in February, Nominacher replied with a smile, “I’m not a software stock market analyst.” “I think some software companies will struggle if they are undifferentiated and easily replaced. But for Celonis, this is a huge opportunity because we are the infrastructure needed to drive this, and with the heavy use of agent AI, the market is growing.” [Agentic AI] You will be able to work more effectively and efficiently. Our biggest constraint is huge demand. ”
He argues that there are clear positives across the private and public sectors. Would doctors want to spend their time talking to patients, or spending hours “chasing 25 clipboards,” as Nominacher puts it? He agrees with those who argue that the end of employment is not imminent.
“Should engineers spend their time triangulating everything?” he says. “Or can you really spend your time understanding what the problem is and determining the right strategy to drive it forward? That doesn’t mean less work. In fact, there’s more work and more relevant work, because instead of getting bogged down, engineers can spend more time talking to customers, doing workshops, and doing high-value work.”
There are currently no talks about going public, he said.
“Longer term, we think Celonis will become a publicly traded company,” he says. “But it has to be done at the right time. Right now we are completely focused on our customers and building the technology. We are not pushing it. [but] There will come a time when you will do it. It’s when it’s right, both from an internal perspective and from a market situation perspective. But nothing in the short to medium term future. ” Many claim that agent AI “changes everything.” And so it will be. But sometimes you also need to focus on how to make bread rolls a little more efficiently.
