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(Corrects name to Greylock Partners in second paragraph)
By Eric Auchard
BERLIN, June 8 (Reuters) - A start-up founded by threeuniversity students has become one of Germany's fastest growingtech firms without taking any outside investment, until now.
On Wednesday, the company, Celonis, will announce it hastaken $27.5 million in venture funding in a first round led bythe London arm of global investor Accel Partners and 83 North,the European-Israeli spin-out of Silicon Valley's GreylockPartners.
The Munich-based company turned profitable just over oneyear after it was formed and this year will generate "severaltens of millions of euros" in revenue, said its co-founder andco-chief executive Alexander Rinke, now 27 years old.
Rinke said the outside funding and business developmentexpertise of the venture firms now backing it can help Celonis"grow to IPO-size level." The company plans to spend the moneyto hire sales staff, upgrade its technology and further globalexpansion, especially into the United States, he said.
Celonis sells a novel form of "big data" analytics softwarethat allows corporate customers to improve how arcane businessprocesses work within each organisation. It analyzes log filesand other bits of data from all computer systems to map out theinner working of the organisation and to identify potentialtechnical bottlenecks.
It has signed up some of the world's biggest companies ascustomers - Siemens AG, ABB Ltd, UBS, KPMG, Deloitte & Touche Plc, BayerAG and Vodafone Plc, as well as a range ofmedium-sized firms - more than 200 customers in all, across 15industries. Twenty of them already have more than 1,000 Celonissoftware users, Rinke said.
It got this far through "bootstrapping" itself, pullingtogether 12,500 euros to get computer systems set up and tappingdry what was left of their student bank accounts until theycould begin to fund themselves from operations.
"The beauty of these 'bootstrapped' companies is that theyhave great entrepreneurs who have already proven their markets,"said Harry Nelis, a partner at Accel.
The company says it has created a new category of businessanalytics software it calls "process mining", while technologymarket research firm Gartner has dubbed the field "AutomatedBusiness Process Discovery".
Rivals include Fluxicon of the Netherlands, Finland's QPRSoftware Plc, and two U.S.-based firms, printing servicescompany Lexmark and SNP AG.
SAP, Europe's largest software company, signed apartnership with Celonis last year to resell its businessprocess mapping software worldwide. (Editing by Diane Craft)
