Munich's Tacto wins EY AI Award 2026 for procurement intelligence from a SIXT, Continental and Bayer jury

Tacto, a Munich company that sells AI software to industrial purchasing departments, has won the EY AI Award 2026 in the category for AI-enabled market and demand intelligence in strategic procurement. The prize went to Tacto Intelligence, its main product, and was decided by a jury that included representatives of the car rental group SIXT, the automotive supplier Continental and the life sciences company Bayer.

An award is not a funding round. But for a start-up selling into the German Mittelstand, where buyers tend to be conservative and reference customers matter, recognition from a Big Four firm and a jury of large corporate buyers is a useful sales argument. It also gives an outside view on a category that many young European companies are now chasing: software that turns procurement data into decisions.

The company announced the win in a post written by co-founder and chief product officer Johannes Groll. It did not give a date for the ceremony or say whether any prize money was attached.

What the jury looked at

Tacto Intelligence combines a manufacturer's own purchasing records with what the company describes as billions of external data points on markets and supply chains. Software agents then work through a customer's entire spend, looking for changes that should affect buying decisions.

According to the company, the system flags several kinds of opportunity:

• savings, based on how prices have moved over time
• room to improve terms in existing supplier contracts
• the effect of current market swings on sourcing plans
• risks hidden in global supply chains
• issues that cut across product categories and sites

Instead of procurement teams hunting for these themselves, the tool proposes actions and ranks them. Tacto said the platform also helps companies standardise routine work such as supplier management, supplier ratings, compliance checks, risk management and the steering of strategic sourcing, so that the same practices apply across plants and categories.

The pitch rests on a familiar complaint from purchasing chiefs. Companies already hold large amounts of data, Tacto argues, but rarely use it in a systematic way, while volatile markets, longer supply chains and cost pressure make that gap more expensive. In the company's view, the next step for procurement is not collecting more sources but drawing better decisions from the information firms already have.

From TU Munich project to Sequoia-backed scale-up

Founded in 2020, the company grew out of a project at the Technical University of Munich. André Petry is chief executive; Groll leads product. The company has focused from the start on mid-sized industrial firms, a large and often under-digitised segment of the German economy.

Its funding history is short but sizeable. Tacto raised a €5.3m seed round led by Cherry Ventures in March 2022. In December 2023 it closed a €50m round led by Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures, with Visionaries Club, Cherry Ventures and UVC Partners also taking part. That brings the total raised to about €55m.

Petry has said in podcast interviews that the business passed 100 customers in the Mittelstand by 2024, and in October 2025 he described Tacto as a company of roughly 100 people. Those figures come from the founder and have not been independently confirmed.

A crowded field in European procurement tech

EY's German arm has run a procurement-focused AI award since 2025, when the winners were Crowdfox and Mercanis, two other German procurement software companies. The jury picks one winner for each use case, so Tacto's prize is tied to a specific job: market and demand intelligence.

Three German winners in two years show how busy the space has become. Tacto's bet is on depth in one customer type: industrial mid-sized firms, with their many suppliers, raw material exposure and multiple sites.

The start-up has not said what it plans to do with the recognition beyond presenting it as validation of its product approach. The more telling test will be commercial. The company has not disclosed revenue, and its last announced round is now nearly three years old, so the next question for investors watching the sector is when Tacto returns to the market, and on what numbers.