Berlin is one of Europe’s key tech hubs. From the capital and beyond, German procurement startups are chipping away at a conservative business culture, making leaps and bounds towards modernising our profession.
We take a look at early stage and growth startups from a country steeped in technological innovation and industrial dynamism.
In this article, we’ve tried to focus on startups primarily serving customers in the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland).
Our other article on 25 hottest European procurement startups features those German startups making waves way beyond their borders.
The 10 Hottest Germany-based Procurement Tech Startups
Before we give you the list, we should briefly touch on what we’ve defined as a “Startup”.
- Less than 50 employees, according to data on LinkedIn.
- Less than 10 years old as a company.
- A company showing signs of growth i.e. numerous customers, and beyond launch stage.
If they are VC-backed, then they must be at pre-Seed or Seed stage. Anyone at Series A onwards, we would typically label as a Scaleup.
If you want to search the whole range of procurement tech companies out there beyond just startups, then check our our free software directory.
If you’re a consultancy, an investor, or a solution provider and need to do deeper analysis of the market, we also offer subscriptions to our back end database, with all data points searchable.
1. Inhubber
Inhubber is a contract management and digital signature platform powered by blockchain and AI. It boasts “the world’s highest security and 100% AI automation”.
Inhubber enables you to create, sign and store contracts securely. It simplifies contracts, making them easy to understand, manage and interact with. It eliminates inefficiencies caused by manual contract analysis and approval processes. At the same time, it also provides AI-powered management of contractual obligations and deliverables.
The platform improves business flow, using the AI as a digital assistant to support you in contract search and contract analysis, as well as reminding you of deadlines and dates.
A contract repository is also built in to securely store all of your contracts in one single platform.
The platform’s own digital signature approves ZIP, Excel, video, and any other file formats. End-to-end encryption provides a uniquely secure way to sign and store contracts, eliminating the need for dedicated servers and VPN connections.
Key Data:
- Founder / CEO: Dr. Elena Mechik
- Date Founded: 2019
- Visit Inhubber profile in our Software Finder
2. Hivebuy
Hivebuy is one of a number of growing German procurement startups based in Berlin, offering process optimisation solution for small and medium-sized companies. It supports them in budgeting, requesting, and ordering articles and services for their business, while benefiting from better purchasing conditions.
The software relies on an intuitively designed approval process, linking departments and approval levels with a simple communication flow. Budget management and control features allow for transparent presentation and allocation of budgets. This enables teams to make decisions and remain in control.
Specific and sustainable supplier catalogues are included, allowing users to benefit from Hivebuy’s bulk buyer conditions. Meanwhile, charts and analysis features give you a ready overview of orders, expenses, and their development, providing insights and optimising your resources.
The software’s contract repository allows you to upload contracts and receive reminders as the contracts are due to expire.
Key Data:
- Founder / CEO: Bettina Fischer
- Date Founded: 2021
- Visit Hivebuy profile in our Software Finder
3. Matchory
Matchory is a German procurement startup offering a data-driven strategic sourcing solution.
The app is built around its large supplier database. This collects supplier data from a range of sources, then applies machine learning and other technologies to analyse it.
This data-driven approach equips users with in-depth market information, helping to guide better decision making.
It also grants users access to a supplier discovery solution with more than 10 million supplier profiles. Along with a cloud-based supplier search engine that aims to fully automate global sourcing.
Their collaboration and management features give you standardised workflows. These aim to simplify processes while providing you with secure, complete documentation.
Matchory strives to meet the ever-more complex needs of global sourcing, with solutions for risk mitigation, process improvement, cost-savings and market insights.
Key Data:
- Founder / CEO: Aiko Wiegand
- Date Founded: 2019
- Visit Matchory profile in our Software Finder
4. Scalue
Scalue is a growing Dusseldorf-based software company, offering a procurement spend analytics solution.
Its use case-driven software aims to save you time and money by accelerating decision-making for procurement teams.
Scalue aims to deliver total spend transparency. It analyses your indirect and direct spend to give you useful insights.
The platform helps users to consolidate and categorise their spend data. This seeks to reduce maverick buying and bring your spend under control.
It also assists users in uncovering savings and increasing liquidity. For example, by analysing and controlling material costs.
Scalue helps to uncover inefficiencies in your P2P processes, offering analytics of your entire procurement organisation, all through a single point of access.
Three different pricing plans are on offer from Scalue, from Essentials (spend analytics without extra features) through to Advanced (extra tracking functionality) and Excellence (suited best to large enterprises).
Key Data:
- Founder / CEO: Samir Kharkan
- Date Founded: 2017
- Visit Scalue profile in our Software Finder
5. Tacto
Tacto develops an intuitive, data-driven, and automated approach to project collaboration in procurement for medium-sized industrial enterprises. It offers solutions for vendor management, sourcing, and productivity.
Tacto allows you to analyse all your data instantly and share it with your team in a simple and understandable way. It uses AI-based data analytics to monitor countless influencing factors on your supplier and item portfolio and respond with effective actions in due time.
The Munich-based company is now officially one of the most successful German procurement startups. They recently announced a whopping EUR 50m of funding to expand their AI-driven offerings. Their transparent overview of procurement activities, algorithmically highlighting risk & savings potential, and automating all transactional workflows in sourcing and supplier management is likely to undergo significant expansion.
Tacto’s platform lets you work seamlessly with your suppliers for an efficient RFQ process and make informed procurement decisions, and also helps you to evaluate suppliers – aggregating soft and hard facts for a comprehensive overview.
You can eliminate tedious processes so as you get to focus on strategic work, leverage savings potential, and reduce complexity without the need for costly IT resources.
Key Data:
- Founder / CEO: André Petry
- Date Founded: 2020
- Visit Tacto profile in our Software Finder
6. Workist
Workist is a German procurement startup with process automation technology, providing AI-powered business automation for document-heavy processes.
Workist’s products are available in Basic, Professional, and Enterprise tiers, serving small businesses, medium sized companies, and large enterprises respectively. They offer solutions for sales order entry and order confirmation checks, all thanks to Workist’s digital supporter, WorKI.
With WorKI, you can receive any unstructured documents (PDF, scan, fax, etc.), then simply let the AI extract and validate the relevant order data and automatically forward them to your ERP-System.
Using artificial intelligence developed for documents, WorKI can process thousands of documents every day. It eliminates manual typing and processes orders quickly and accurately. This reduces errors that cost you time and money, and allows your team to focus on customer engagement, closing new deals and scaling your business.
With Workist, you can immediately spot any inconsistencies in order confirmations, improve your production planning and speed up the order fulfilment process.
Key Data:
- Founder / CEO: Tim Wegner
- Date Founded: 2019
- Visit Workist profile in our Software Finder
7. Covalyze
Covalyze is an intelligent software platform from the Munich-based software company Valunoo.
It’s designed for OEMs and enterprise manufacturers who seek to drive down costs of sourced components and services, whilst accelerating time to market.
With its AI-based analytics, Covalyze enables you to negotiate better. It’s designed to help users manage their purchasing categories – offering higher negotiation impact and data driven insights.
It features numerous modules for price management. These aim to ensure optimal parts procurement, and help users to quickly find answers to questions common in engineering processes.
The software’s Target Price Calculator gives you real time market prices for new component designs, based on price-driving features. This helps to optimize designs towards lower cost and eliminates waiting times for supplier quotations.
Key Data:
- Founder / CEO: Christian Haas
- Date Founded: 2019
- Visit Covalyze profile in our Software Finder
8. Gryn
GRYN is a sustainability software company that offers a carbon management platform designed for logistics companies and shippers. The platform allows you to measure, analyse, report on and reduce your carbon emissions and overall environmental impact.
GRYN automatically collects emissions data from logistics partners through APIs and spreadsheets and calculates carbon footprints compliant with greenhouse gas (GHG) protocol standards. The software provides real-time visibility into carbon emissions through interactive dashboards. It also benchmarks performance, identifies opportunities to reduce emissions, and guides users on obtaining higher data quality for more accurate footprinting.
Key features include data automation, carbon reporting, simulation of reduction scenarios, offsetting, and sustainability benchmarking. GRYN aims to build a global community of shippers, logistics companies, and other stakeholders committed to reducing carbon emissions from logistics operations. The software simplifies carbon management and engages stakeholders across the supply chain.
Key Data:
- Founder / CEO: Oliver Ritzmann
- Date Founded: 2022
- Visit GRYN profile in our Software Finder
9. 7Q1
Germany-based 7Q1 offers an AI solution to automate and optimise enterprise supplier search and selection. The company works with large manufacturers and corporations like Bosch, Continental, and ThyssenKrupp.
Leveraging AI, the platform can analyse the entire internet to identify and suggest relevant new suppliers globally. Alternatively, users can customise the underlying AI algorithms without technical knowledge.
Key features include highly configurable search criteria, multilingual searches across 160+ languages, automated supplier filtering and scoring, seamless integration with existing procurement systems, built-in ESG, and a CO2 footprint calculator to help users make sustainable procurement decisions.
7Q1 aims to reduce manual supplier search effort, increase sourcing speed and efficiency, and provide more comprehensive, up-to-date, and unbiased supplier recommendations vs. traditional approaches. The solution targets different enterprises in numerous industries, from automotive, retail, to life science and pharma, and integrates with SAP, Jagger, Oracle, Sage, and Microsoft Dynamics.
Key Data:
- Founder / CEO: Daisuke Spielvogel
- Date Founded: 2021
- Visit 7Q1 profile in our Software Finder
10. Mercanis
Mercanis is one of the German procurement startups focusing on the procurement and lifecycle management of services, as well as other areas of indirect procurement for medium-sized businesses.
Their product facilitates enterprise-wide collaboration, unifies and visualises supplier information, and automates workflow. The software leverages AI to scout for suitable sources, as well as offering solutions for both strategic and tail spend in the services space.
Furthermore, Mercanis’ platform centralises and secures data and provides insights based on these, informing decision-making. Finally, Mercanis’ platform can integrate seamlessly into the client’s existing procurement tech stack.
Key Data:
- Founder / CEO: Fabian Heinrich
- Date Founded: 2020
- Visit Mercanis profile in our Software Finder
Beyond German procurement startups
Has this tickled your curiosity about procuretech? Maybe you want to learn more about what solutions are out there, representing different areas of procurement.
Or perhaps you could use some help for how to search and select a provider for your organisation.
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