Elevatry raises €3m pre-seed for AI agents in strategic procurement

Elevatry raises €3m pre-seed for AI agents in strategic procurement

15 October 2026: Elevatry, a Munich start-up building AI agents for corporate purchasing teams, has raised €3 million in a pre-seed round from Bayern Kapital, the management consultancy H&Z and six business angels. The company says its platform went live on 28 September 2026 and calls the round the largest German software pre-seed of the year.

Not yet independently verified. Single source: Elevatry's own release. Its claim to the largest German software pre-seed round of 2026 is its own, and it names no customers. Quotations are our translations from German. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

What the platform does

Elevatry's software works on strategic procurement, the part of purchasing that decides which suppliers a company uses and on what terms, rather than on processing orders. Its agents, which it calls Companions, include a Category Strategist, a Negotiation Coach and a Risk and Integrity Manager. They take on analysis, research and scenario work across the source-to-contract process: needs analysis, sourcing strategy, tendering, supplier selection, should-cost analysis, negotiation, contract and results tracking.

The company describes the product as a "system of initiative" rather than a system of record: it plans, ranks work by expected impact in euros and prepares proposals, while decisions stay with the team. Customers set the level of autonomy, approvals and data ownership, and the platform runs on several language models. What it learns builds a knowledge layer that Elevatry says belongs only to the customer.

"Strategic procurement is one of the biggest profit levers in a company," said chief executive Heiko Schwarz, in our translation. The release illustrates the point with a company of €1 billion in revenue and €500 million in purchasing spend, where a 10% improvement would add €50 million to profit.

Who backed the round

Besides Bayern Kapital, Bavaria's public venture investor, and H&Z, the angels are Jan Henner-Theißen, Martin Berr-Sorokin, Mike Simon, Markus Ehrle, Andreas Junck and Alexander Bruehl of SaaS Garage. Bruehl said he invested because the team has decades of procurement experience and that Elevatry targets purchasing volume, "where the largest lever lies", rather than ordering.

Elevatry will spend the money on the platform and new Companions and on its market launch, hiring in engineering, AI, marketing and customer care. It starts in the German-speaking countries and the EU, with North America as a medium-term goal.

Three founders with exits behind them

Schwarz has about 25 years in procurement and procurement software and previously founded riskmethods, a supplier risk platform acquired by Sphera. Christian Ruck, chief product officer, was an associate partner at McKinsey and chief operating officer of the procurement software company Orpheus, which McKinsey bought. Tizian Ruck leads AI development.

Our sourcing software category lists 19 products and our procurement software category five.

Company profile on TrustList: Elevatry

Sources

• Elevatry: Elevatry sammelt 3 Mio. Euro ein und lanciert KI-Plattform für den strategischen Einkauf (in German), 15 October 2026