The billion-dollar startup Celonis buys Symbio from Bavaria. The purchase should give users access to generative AI, for example for querying the causes of bottlenecks.
Celonis founder Alexander Rinke relies entirely on AI Celonis
With an acquisition, the Munich-based software company Celonis is laying the foundation for companies to be able to use a chatbot to find out where there are problems in their business processes. Celonis announced on Monday the acquisition of the company Symbioworld, which specializes in managing business processes using artificial intelligence. It was agreed not to disclose the purchase price.
Celonis is one of the German startups with the highest rating and is a pioneer in process mining, in which business processes in companies are digitally evaluated. Symbio software helps to understand the connections between individual data points, as Celonis top manager Carsten Thoma explained.
“Employees and entire companies are able to gain new insights, for example about the causes of bottlenecks. Together with information about the context of a process, they can implement recommendations and achieve improvements more quickly,” said Symbio CEO Oliver Zeller in the official announcement.
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In classic process mining, for example, you could see that some invoices have not yet been paid, some orders have not been completely fulfilled, and a component has long delivery times. With the new platform, you can immediately see that the invoices are outstanding because orders are incomplete – and the reason for this is the missing component.
Celonis relies on ChatGPT from OpenAI
With this knowledge, users in the company could query the results using so-called generative AI such as chatbots.
The two Munich companies had already worked on the technology. Celonis wants to make language models available to customers in a few months. Software from ChatGPT inventor OpenAI is used to communicate with users; instead, open source models that can be customized more deeply are used internally.
Symbio was founded in 2005 by Oliver Zeller and Steffen Ploetz. The company has its headquarters in Aschheim, Bavaria.