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More than $1 trillion is spent by enterprises annually on “digital transformation” — the investments that organizations make to update their IT systems to get more out of them and reduce costs — and today one of the bigger startups that’s built a platform to help get the ball rolling is announcing a huge round of funding.

Celonis, a leader in the area of process mining — which tracks data produced by a company’s software, as well as how the software works, in order to provide guidance on what a company could and should do to improve it — has raised $290 million in a Series C round of funding, giving the startup a post-money valuation of $2.5 billion.

Celonis was founded in 2011 in Munich — an industrial and economic center in Germany that you could say is a veritable Petri dish when it comes to large business in need of digital transformation — and has been cash-flow positive from the start. In fact, Celonis waited until it was nearly six years old to take its first outside funding (prior to this Series C it had picked up less than $80 million, see here and here).

The size and timing of this latest equity injection is due to seizing the moment, and tapping networks of people to do so. It has already been growing at a triple-digit rate, with customers like Siemens, Cisco, L’Oréal, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone among them. 

“Our tech has become its own category with a lot of successful customers,” Bastian Nominacher, the co-CEO who co-founded the company with Alexander Rinke and Martin Klenk, said in an interview. “It’s a key driver for sustainable business operations, and we felt that we needed to have the right network of people to keep momentum in this market.”

To that end, this latest round’s participants lines up with the company’s strategic goals. It is being led by Arena Holdings — an investment firm led by Feroz Dewan — with Ryan Smith, co-founder and CEO of Qualtrics; and Tooey Courtemanche, founder and CEO of Procore, also included, alongside previous investors 83North and Accel.

Celonis said Smith will be a special advisor, working alongside another strategic board member, Hybris founder Carsten Thoma. Dewan, meanwhile, used to run hedge funds for Tiger Global (among other roles) and currently sits on the board of directors of Kraft Heinz.

“Celonis is the clear market leader in a category with open-ended potential. It has demonstrated an enviable record of growth and value creation for its customers and partners,” said Dewan in a statement. “Celonis helps companies capitalise on two inexorable trends that cut across geography and industry: the use of data to enable faster, better decision-making and the desire for all businesses to operate at their full potential.”

The core of Celonis’ offering is to provide process mining around an organizations’ IT systems. Nominacher said that this could include anything from 5 to over 100 different pieces of software, with the main idea being that Celonis’s platform monitors a company’s whole solar system of apps, so to speak, in order to produce its insights — providing and “X-ray” view of the situation, in the words of Rinke.

Those insights, in turn, are used either by the company itself, or by consultants engaged by the organization, to make further suggestions, whether that’s to implement something like robotic process automation (RPA) to speed up a specific process, or use a different piece of software to crunch data better, or reconfigure how staff is deployed, and so on. This is not a one-off thing: the idea is continuous monitoring to pick up new patterns or problems.

In recent times, the company has started to expand the system into a wider set of use cases, by providing tools to monitor operations and customer experience, and to apply its process mining engine to a wider set of company sizes beyond large enterprises, and by bringing in more AI to its basic techniques.

Interestingly, Nominacher said that there are currently no plans to, say, extend into RPA or other “fixing” tools itself, pointing to a kind of laser strategy that is likely part of what has helped it grow so well up to now.

“It’s important to focus on the relevant parts of what you provide,” he said. “We one layer, one that can give the right guidance.”

Between Amazon, FedEx, UPS and indie merchants, it’s easy to lose track of when your online purchases will be delivered. And if you’re buying something pricey or important, a lack of shipping insurance can leave you anxious and constantly checking your porch.

But a fresh startup has found unprecedented growth by letting you monitor all your e-commerce orders in one app thanks to a Gmail extension. Plus, you can buy insurance for just 1% of an item’s cost. Meet Route, emerging from stealth today to become the Find My Friends for packages. By helping merchants handle post-purchase satisfaction while charging consumers for insurance, this year Route has grown to $8.85 million in revenue run rate and from 5 to 100 employees.

Now Route is announcing it has raised $12 million in total through a quiet $500,00 January pre-seed round from Peak Venture Capital and a new seed round with the rest from Album VC and strategic partner in direct-to-consumer brands, Pattern. The cash will help Route keep up with demand and add new features to its app. Route co-founder and CEO Evan Walker tells me consumers “no longer accept the unsatisfying status quo of not knowing exactly where their order is.”

Domino’s saw sales skyrocket thanks to its highly visual pizza tracker app that shows live updates as your pie goes in the oven, hits the road and reaches your door. Route wants to bring that reassuring experience to all of e-commerce.

Route co-founder and CEO Evan Walker

Walker asks, “How could I NOT build this company?” The 25-year e-commerce entrepreneur got his start selling video games online in 1994, and has founded seven companies since. The communications gap between customers and merchants always plagued his businesses.

“The big lightbulb moment happened when I was traveling in Italy a few years back,” Walker recalls. Talking to a furniture shop owner, he heard about their troubles of shipping vintage trunks. “He mentioned he was having a lot of issues with these items breaking in transit and wished he had a solution for it.” Now there is one.

The Route iOS app for visually tracking orders officially launches today. Purchases from partnered merchants instantly show up in the app and its website via API, but all your other buys from Amazon etc. can be automatically ingested by authorizing the Route Bot Gmail extension that scans for shipping updates. Route lays out all the orders on a map with immediate access to their latest status changes, like when shipping info is received, an item goes out for last-mile delivery or there’s a problem. There’s no need to copy and paste tracking numbers across multiple websites.

The Route+ insurance program that lets customers pay for peace of mind is launching today too. Customers get the option to add it from partnered merchants, file claims for lost / damaged / stolen packages in one tap and get reimbursement from respected Lloyd’s of London.

Walker claims that merchants that offer Route+ (which is free for them) “have seen an increase in conversion, decreased spend on customer support teams and an improved post-purchase customer experience due to Route’s ability to quickly handle customer claims.” Merchants can also opt to pay themselves for Route+ on every order.

Route now works with 1,600 merchants and 600 carriers and has overseen shipments to 1.3 million customers in 187 countries. John Mayfield from Peak Venture Capital says, “Their phenomenal growth of acquiring over 600 clients in the first three months makes them one of the fastest growing companies we have ever seen.”

The biggest challenge for Route is overcoming the thick, thick crowd of competitors in the market. Rakuten’s Slice can pull orders from your email and also grabs you refunds if an item goes on sale after you buy it. 17Track lets you paste in big lists of tracking numbers in case they’re registered to someone else’s email. Parcel offers a barcode scanner. ‘Deliveries’ will set up calendar appointments for arrivals, and works on Mac and Apple Watch. ParcelTrack lets you forward it emails of purchases to monitor, and a $2.99 premium version offers live locations of your packages plus customizable push notifications.

Route’s strength is that it’s totally free for consumers unless they want to buy insurance, and does email tracking automatically, though it will lack manual tracking number input for a few more weeks. It has managed a 90% customer satisfaction score. Still, the startup could be vulnerable to a major player in e-commerce like Amazon or Shopify barging into the space. There are also platform risks, such as if Gmail blocked its scanning for tracking numbers, though Google is currently partnered with Route to facilitate email scanning.

“The better that Amazon gets at providing similar services, the more other merchants need those tools in order to compete outside of Amazon,” says Walker. “From the insurance side, we are pretty good at detecting risk before it becomes a major issue and we are insuring on an individual order basis so catastrophic incidences are minimized.” The company also has to keep a watchful eye out for fraudulent insurance claims.

The growing megatrend of purchase behavior shifting online means the once occasional activity of receiving a package has become a constant chore in need of streamlining. Plenty of merchants are meanwhile looking to offload the complexity of keeping impatient buyers happy. If Route conquers its first market, it could move into adjacent spaces, ranging from merchant services like freight forwarding and financing to consumer features like physical mail scanning for electronic delivery.

“E-commerce is in my blood. I feel like I’ve taken 25 years of experience and started to craft a really interesting product in this space,” Walker concludes. “With commerce going more digital everyday, there is an opportunity to create a big dent.” Or in Route‘s case, an opportunity to insure your packages against big dents.

Wonderbly, the personalised book publisher backed by Google Ventures and best known for the breakout hit “Lost My Name,” is unveiling Wonderbly Studios in a bid to make it easier for other brands to offer personalised and bespoke printed books on-demand.

Initially, Wonderfully Studios will work with select partners to provide access to its personalisation API and help create new books using its technology and expertise in the space. However, longer term, Wonderbly co-founder and CEO Asi Sharabi tells me the plan is to continue developing the platform and eventually open up the whole thing so that anybody can offer high-quality and data-infused personalised books via its API.

“Selling high-quality personalised products — products that extend beyond the trivial ‘put my name on a mug’ — is no easy task,” he says. “Meaningfully personalised products and businesses are still quite complex to operate at scale. You need a rendering stack, integration with a local print house, couriers, customer support and more. These technical and operational hurdles are a barrier to entry.”

Sharabi adds that although Wonderbly is aware of some “cool” personalised book ideas already on the market, he says that very few are reaching meaningful scale. “We hope to change all that with our personalisation platform and provide a fast, seamless experience with responsive previews and high-fidelity physical products for multiple and complex personalisation logics,” he says.

The first project to come out of Wonderbly Studios is an interactive journal from Wizarding World (the Official Harry Potter Fan Club), which is a joint venture between Pottermore Ltd. and Warner Bros.

The “Keys and Curios” journal is described as full of interactive surprises and secrets that can be unlocked using the Wizarding World app. It incorporates a fan’s name, house traits and more to take them on a unique journey through the wizarding year.

The book’s contents were written and designed by the Wizarding World Digital team, and feature images from across the Wizarding World, artwork by illustrator Jim Kay and specially designed Hogwarts house covers by MinaLima (the graphic designer design team behind some of the visuals from the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts films).

Meanwhile, the personalisation technology, e-commerce integration and on-demand printing/logistics is powered by Wonderbly.

“The end customers interact via the partner’s e-commerce stack,” explains Sharabi. “These stacks (e.g Shopify or Magento) were not built for personalised products and customisation. Adding this functionality is hard — we know, we’ve been doing it for five years. This is why we developed the Wonderbly Personalisation API.”

Products created on the Wonderbly platform can deliver a “limitless amount of creativity, constrained only by imagination,” says the Wonderbly CEO. That’s because Wonderbly takes cares of a lot of the remaining heavy-lifting.

“Products are rendered in real time at scale for customers as part of the shopping experience,” explains Sharabi. “The platform handles the complexities of integrating with e-commerce systems in a developer-friendly way, making it a simple task to add a personalised product to a cart. When an order is completed a simple web hook ensures that the products are rendered, printed and shipped to the customer, while feeding into our partner’s systems for progress notification and customer support.”

The breadth of personalised books we might see come to market as Wonderbly Studios opens up further is impossible to predict. That’s because the full range of potential experiences is something that no single person or team could ever imagine, which, of course is the whole point.

As Sharabi previously told TechCrunch, you can’t scale creativity in the same way as tech — you have to allow creativity to come from anywhere.

“What if you can create a customised art, poetry or recipes book at the same ease you make a Spotify playlist?” he asks rhetorically. “What would gaming printed yearbooks look like? What if travel guides and language acquisition become more personalised? What if you can order an ‘I was there’ personalised keepsake for live gigs and festivals? These and more are questions that get us very excited.”

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Aircall is a cloud-based phone system that can help satisfy the needs of your customer support and sales teams. It’s easy to set up and scale, intuitive for users, has proven high-quality calls and can connect to your existing CRM in a few clicks. You can learn more about Aircall here. 

You must meet the following criteria to qualify for the Aircall community perk from Extra Crunch:

• Must be an annual or two-year Extra Crunch member. You can sign up here.
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• Cannot have existing account or past account with Aircall.

The two months free from Aircall is inclusive of subscription fees, but not inclusive of minutes on annual contracts.

Extra Crunch is a membership program from TechCrunch that features how-tos and interviews on company building, intelligence on the most disruptive opportunities for startups, an experience on TechCrunch.com that’s free of banner ads, discounts on TechCrunch events and several community perks like the one mentioned in this article. Our goal is to democratize information about startups, and we’d love to have you join our community.

You can sign up for Extra Crunch here.

After signing up for an annual or two-year Extra Crunch membership, you’ll receive a welcome email with a link to sign up for Aircall and special code to enter to claim the discount. Aircall offers a free seven-day trial, and if you are interested in purchasing an annual plan after the trial you can enter the code to get two months free. 

If you are already an annual or two-year Extra Crunch member, you will receive an email with the offer at some point today. If you are currently a monthly Extra Crunch subscriber and want to upgrade to annual in order to claim this deal, head over to the “my account” section on TechCrunch.com and click the “upgrade” button.

This is one of several community perks we’ve recently launched for Extra Crunch members. Other community perks include a 20% discount on TechCrunch events, 100,000 Brex rewards points upon credit card sign up and an opportunity to claim $1,000 in AWS credits.

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Sign up for an annual Extra Crunch membership today to claim this community perk. You can purchase an annual Extra Crunch membership here.