Entrepreneur and Tech Executive Carsten Thoma Invests in Celonis and Joins as Strategic Advisor

Celonis today announced that Carsten Thoma, successful enterprise software entrepreneur, investor, and mentor of several emerging global start-ups, invests in and becomes strategic advisor of Celonis. Carsten Thoma shaped the technological shift of customer engagement and commerce solutions with hybris GmbH, a company he co-founded in 1997 and sold to SAP in 2013 for an undisclosed sum, making it at the time the highest value paid for a private technology acquisition.

"Carsten has played an instrumental role in one of our industry's most exceptional growth stories, with Hybris' evolution from a small start-up into a multi-billion dollar business," said Alex Rinke, co-founder of Celonis. "His expertise in shaping new industries and scaling disruptive technology organizations will be a significant asset to our mission to help companies operate faster, simpler, and smarter, and we are delighted to welcome him to the Celonis team."

Thoma was most recently president of SAP Hybris, where he was responsible for SAP’s customer engagement and commerce line of business, the company’s fastest-growing business unit, covering SAP’s CRM, marketing, commerce, service, sales, and revenue products. Under his leadership, SAP made a significant shift to the cloud and SAP Hybris solutions helped some of the world’s leading organizations to attract, retain, and grow a profitable customer base. He was critical to SAP’s successful paradigm shift in redefining the front office, revolutionizing its marketing cloud solution by integrating customer identity and profile management capabilities in compliance with GDPR, and rearchitecting as a microservices-based architecture.

"Throughout my career, I've been passionate about building companies with accelerated growth that define new categories, shape new markets, and elevate the customer experience," said Thoma. "I've been fortunate enough to help define a new market and build a special company, and now I'm excited to share what I've learned on this journey with one of the industry's most promising technology companies. I believe Celonis has an extraordinary opportunity to help companies to transform and I am thrilled to join the team."