Alexander launched Celonis when he was 22 with two friends, Martin Klenk and Bastian Nominacher, in 2011 after they had finished maths and computer science degrees at the Technical University of Munich.
Expanding on a project they had worked on as part of their courses, Celonis is a hi-tech data mining company that uses software and artificial intelligence to monitor the performance of businesses, to help them become more efficient and work better.
In very simple terms, Celonis’s software will monitor a company’s computer system, and find out things such as which employees are being unproductive, which suppliers are too slow, and which production processes could be streamlined. It then suggests solutions.
The three friends were confident about what they could offer businesses, but they just needed to get themselves noticed.
Hence the handwritten letters.
They worked like a treat, leading to meetings with some of the largest companies in Europe.
Today, eight years later, Celonis’s customers include BMW, Exxon-Mobile, General Motors, L’Oreal, Siemens, Uber and Vodafone.
And after securing an additional $50m (£39m) of investment last year, Celonis says it is now valued at more than $1bn (£780m).
