It's the final episode of our second series. So to finish up, we're going to be doing something a little bit different.
This week we're bringing you 10 new startups for the price of one!
10 cool early stage European startups from Procurement Summit
I recently attended Procurement Summit in Hamburg. It's a fun, pleasingly non-corporate showcase for new companies in the digital procurement space. Where else would you find a Mario Kart competition at a procurement conference?
I saw loads of exciting new ideas there, and I'd like to share ten of the best new startups that caught my eye during the conference's pitch event.
1. Flowciety
Flowciety won the startup pitch event this year, and with good reason.
They're a Berlin-based startup, all about data exchange and process automation, across both internal departments and external third parties.
This automation enables you to have a fully auditable trail, avoiding PDFs and emails in favour of realtime tracking. It also enables you to manage supply chain and inventory across, for example, a subcontracted part of an external process.
Link to Flowciety website
2. Shouldcosting
This Swiss-based startup aims to make companies more competitive by using their internal data more effectively. This is a really smart calculation tool that takes things from the bottom up.
It's a data driven engine that estimates product prices based on CAD drawings, specifications and materials. It estimates the cost of raw materials and of cost changes per part, based on engineering changes during the new product development process, or on commodity price movements in our increasingly volatile world.
It also calculates labour costs and provides advanced analytics and material grouping.
Link to Shouldcosting website
3. Hivebuy
Hivebuy is a source to contract solution, strongly focused on process optimisation for small to medium sized businesses.
The solution supports companies in budgeting, requesting and ordering services for their business. It also establishes better purchasing conditions for your business, through pooling of pricing on popular catalogues.
Obviously this is quite market-dependant, and the company has a strong focus on Germany at the moment, but I'm told that they are looking to expand this scope.
The software relies an intuitively designed approval process that link departments with a simple communication flow and approvals process.
Control features offer a transparent dashboard for budget management per department. Hivebuy also offers supplier catalogues both externally and internally, along with contract management and repository as part of their more top end plans.
It's a unique spin in a crowded niche, which I find very interesting.
Link to Hivebuy website
4. TrueLedger
This startup from Zurich is a professional services platform focused on external workforce. According to their presentation, 30% of human capital is now external contractors, and this represents 42% of a company's spend on people, on average.
As opposed to other external workforce platforms that focus on audit and legal compliance, these guys are very much focused on smart contracting as a way to reduce costs.
TrueLedger offers many forms of control here: Time and materials contracts, cost ceilings, standard contracts, and risk sharing, across both blue collar and white collar. All of which flows through to automatic invoicing and ERP integration.
Link to TrueLedger website
5. Lhotse Analyitcs
Lhotse are very much focused on industrial manufacturing companies, from the midmarket to enterprise. Because these are often low margin industries, it's crucial to have better data that creates measurable value.
They claim that their software can produce 7.5% savings on average to their customers, using market intelligence and cost breakdowns to offer the best leverage possible.
Especially in industrial manufacturing companies, the supplier's sales person is often the better informed party during negotiations. This solution aims to change that by arming businesses with better data and 360 spend analytics.
Link to Lhotse Analytics website
6. Procuros
Procuros, based in Hamburg, automates B2B transactions. It acts as one-to-all middleware between ERP systems and the end user. This turns manual ERP processes into digital workflows with a user friendly interface.
Procuros enables automatic data exchange from ERP system, via a self-serve interface for buyer and stakeholder alike. This, according to them, makes requesting and onboarding suppliers as easy as sending someone a facebook friend request.
Link to Procuros website
7. Matchory
This German startup offers a supplier scouting tool which is simple and effective. It brings unstructured, decentralised and diverse supplier information into a harmonised supplier search.
It does this three ways. With a web scraper that searches for supplier data, by accessing publicly accessible data and through an API that talks to other systems, extracts data, and enriches it.
This data is then cleansed using ML and AI. T
Matchory claim that it only takes five minutes to find the right supplier through their platform, so this is great for anyone who's new to their category or doesn't already have a large database of potential suppliers.
Link to Matchory website
8. PAXLY
Paxly is another German startup with a very niche focus on packaging spend. Their solution helps with sourcing, selection and evaluation of bids in the packaging category. It's hard to source packaging in a standard invoicing platform, so what PAXLY aims to do is create a simple channel that's custom-tuned to the needs of packaging procurement.
Link to PAXLY website
9. Tacto
Based in Munich, Tacto offer an end-to-end source-to-contract and analytics portal for direct manufacturing business, especially medium sized ones.
The focus here is on creating an intelligent procurement operating system that easily identifies opportunities and realises them within the platform - covering everything from sourcing, RFX, ajd operational purchasing ato analytics, as well as offering a supplier and vendor portal.
Their USP is being plug and play, with no high level consulting or ERP integration required to get the most out of the platform.
Link to Tacto website
10. Negotiation Intelligence
Another Swiss startup, this might be the one that I found most intriguing. A completely new concept, Negotiation Intelligence combines tech with human experience.
It tackles the challenge of negotiation training. I'm sure we've all been on this kind of training, forgot most of what we were told and pushed the handout into a drawer to never be looked at again. And fair enough - the static classroom environment doesn't always translate to the real world.
Negotiation Intelligence aims to solve that by using an AI-driven core engine that gives live training, with built-in negotiation roleplays that gamify the training experience. On top of that, there's an ongoing toolkit for subscribers to improve their negotiation skills. Negotiation Intelligence combines the power of speech recognition, advanced data analytics, and human-delivered coaching for a truly hybrid approach.
One of the things I found most interesting here was that you can then host internal league tables within an organisation so you can see who your strongest negotiators are. Not only fostering a competitive attitude, but allowing you to see where your human resources will be best spent.
Link to Negotiation Intelligence website
Wrapping up Series 2
With that, we've reached the end of Series 2.
And I just want to take a moment to thank everyone for listening to this series of the podcast.
I'm really honoured and humbled that we've been able to double our average number of monthly listeners this season, and I can't thank you all enough for that.
I hope you're just as excited as I am about what we've got coming up in the future, on procurementsoftware.site as a whole, and on this podcast, which comes back for Series 3 in September this year.
Until then, we hope you have a great summer!
There's plenty more to come in the future, and I look forward to seeing there.
Stay in touch
Find today's featured startups on LinkedIn and beyond!
- Flowciety
- Shouldcosting
- Hivebuy
- TureLedger
- Lhotse Analytics
- Procuros
- Matchory
- PAXLY
- Tacto
- Negotiation Intelligence
Stay in touch!
