The tech boss who 'x-rays' businesses

Alexander Rinker, co-founder and co-CEO of Salonis, reveals how a university lecture on process mining sparked a revolutionary idea: using digital footprints to create an 'x-ray' of business operations. What began as a side project for a local Munich radio station evolved into a $13 billion company that helps organizations visualize, diagnose, and automate inefficient workflows. Rinker describes the early days as a scrappy bootstrapped venture—funded by $5,000 each from three friends, with no external investors—highlighting the emotional and financial toll of building a B2B software startup without venture capital. Despite initial skepticism in Germany, the team pivoted to the US market, where they found traction with large enterprises. Now, Salonis is at the heart of the AI revolution, providing the business context that large language models lack. The company’s mission isn’t just efficiency—it’s human-centered transformation, enabling teams to redeploy from repetitive tasks to uniquely human work. Rinker argues that automation isn’t about cutting jobs, but about unlocking growth and innovation by removing friction from processes. The episode exposes a critical gap in Europe’s startup ecosystem: while talent and innovation abound, the venture capital infrastructure lags behind the US, where pension funds and deep-pocketed investors fuel early-stage growth. Rinker calls for Europe to unlock its vast capital reserves to support next-generation tech.