AI startup Mercura raises over 2.1 million US dollars

The Munich-based AI company Mercura has raised more than 2.1 million US dollars in an oversubscribed seed round. The round was led by TQ Ventures, SignalFire and Y Combinator, supplemented by several high-profile business angels from the European tech ecosystem.

The private investors include Bastian Nominacher (Co-Founder and CEO of Celonis), Tao Tao (Co-Founder and COO of GetYourGuide) and Lukas Deutsch, Chief Controlling Officer at SAP.

AI automates quotation, order and tendering processes

Mercura is developing an AI-based software solution to automate time-consuming sales tasks in wholesale and industry. The platform processes unstructured customer inquiries and translates them into structured, product-specific quotations, orders or tenders within a matter of minutes.

The focus is on previously less digitized industries such as construction, electrical engineering, building technology and technical building equipment (TGA), in which complex product catalogs, individual requirements and manual processes slow down sales considerably.

Proprietary AI models for an 8 trillion dollar industry

Mercura combines modern AI research with in-depth industry knowledge and relies on proprietary AI models and its own product matching engine. These are specially tailored to the requirements of industrial sales processes and integrate seamlessly into existing ERP and CRM systems.

The AI agents act like experienced sales experts, learn continuously and improve their results through reinforcement learning. The aim is to automate processes that have long been considered too complex or too individual for traditional software.

The target market is enormous. The global distribution sector for wholesale and industry is estimated to be worth around 8 trillion US dollars.

Profitable since its foundation, now it's time to scale up

Remarkable: Mercura has been profitable since it was founded and has so far operated without external capital. Its customers already include manufacturers and wholesalers in Europe and the USA, including Bauder, Reisser AG, Siteco and the Dutch BME Group, which also includes BAUKING and SHK Deutschland.

Mercura plans to use the new capital in particular to expand the engineering team, further develop the product matching engine and scale internationally. The company is aiming for a double-digit million turnover in 2026.

Founding team with industry DNA and AI expertise

The founding team, Lukas Bock (CEO), Stefan Zheng and Sean Sdahl, combines in-depth industry experience, business expertise and AI research. Bock comes from a family business that is over 115 years old and previously worked at Google X in Silicon Valley. Zheng brings experience in consulting and venture capital, while Sdahl was a physicist at the Max Planck Institute and later worked as a software engineer at Bosch and Mercedes-Benz AMG.