Celonis, the process intelligence company based in Munich and New York, signed a definitive agreement on May 12, 2026 to acquire Ikigai Labs, a startup that builds AI for forecasting, planning and simulation on business data. Celonis announced the deal on the same day it launched a new product, the Celonis Context Model.
The companies did not disclose the price or other financial terms. Celonis said it expected the deal to close imminently, subject to standard closing procedures.
Ikigai's team, which works on machine learning, tabular and time-series modelling, causal inference and large-scale simulation, is joining Celonis. Co-founder Devavrat Shah, a chaired professor of AI at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, becomes Celonis's chief scientist for enterprise AI.
What Ikigai Labs built
Ikigai was founded in 2019 on research carried out at MIT over almost two decades. Its software works with the tabular and time-series data that companies keep in spreadsheets, databases and cloud data stores, rather than with text.
The platform was organised around three tools: aiMatch for reconciling data, aiCast for forecasting and aiPlan for scenario planning, with an expert-in-the-loop system in which human specialists help train the models. The company holds a patent on what it calls a Large Graphical Model, which powers the platform. Celonis said Ikigai's specialists had worked with large enterprises to cut planning and forecasting cycles, for example in supply chains, from months to minutes.
Constellation Research reported that Ikigai's AI Co-Planner product, which combines demand, supply chain, finance and sales planning, was live, and that further products for supply chain execution and marketing were in development.
“Ikigai Labs was built on a simple but firm conviction: better enterprise decisions require AI that works with enterprise data.”
Why Celonis is buying
Celonis sells software that maps how business processes actually run by mining data from systems such as ERP and CRM tools. Its new Context Model is meant to give AI agents a live model of a company's operations so that they can reason and act on accurate information.
Celonis said Ikigai would add planning, simulation and forecasting to the Context Model, so that customers could model future scenarios and predict process breakdowns before they happen. Celonis president Carsten Thoma said the purchase would extend the platform from describing how a business runs today to how it could run in future.
Shah said in the announcement that Ikigai had proven foundation model technology for structured data at scale, while Celonis had encoded enterprise processes, and that the two together gave the fullest picture of how a business operates.
MIT patents and a stake in Celonis
One unusual feature of the deal involves MIT itself. Ikigai had licensed patents owned by the university. Under the agreement, Celonis gains exclusive rights to those patents, and MIT becomes a shareholder in Celonis. The companies did not say how large a stake MIT will hold.
Shah's move to Celonis keeps the researcher behind Ikigai's core technology with the product. Neither company said how many Ikigai employees would join or whether the Ikigai brand would continue.
The founders and the funding
Shah founded Ikigai in 2019 with Vinayak Ramesh, according to Wamda, and served as its co-chief executive. The company raised a $25 million Series A in August 2023 from Premji Invest, Foundation Capital and e& capital, the UAE-based venture arm of communications group e&. At the time, it described its product as a no-code platform for generative AI on tabular data and said the money would go into the platform and its Ikigai Academy, which it said had trained more than 6,000 students from over 90 countries.
Partners from Premji Invest and Foundation Capital both gave statements supporting the deal in Celonis's announcement. Sandesh Patnam of Premji Invest said adding Ikigai's simulation and decision intelligence to Celonis's operational data would create a feedback loop that competitors would find hard to copy. Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital said the companies that control this layer of enterprise software would define its next era.
