Mercura Targets $10M ARR as Munich Team Automates Industrial Quoting

Industrial supply chains run on non-standardized requests for quotes, fragmented product catalogs, and back-and-forth manual order entry. Mercura, founded in Munich in 2024, builds AI quote and order automation software specifically tailored for distributors and manufacturers.

After completing the Y Combinator W25 accelerator batch and securing seed backing from investors including TQ Ventures, SignalFire, Celonis co-founder Bastian Nominacher, and GetYourGuide co-founder Tao Tao, the startup crossed $2M in annual recurring revenue in its first year. The 14-person company is now hiring across engineering and sales to reach its target of $10M ARR by the end of 2026.

Digitizing Manual Quoting for the Trades

Mercura focuses on distributors and industrial manufacturers that handle heavy volumes of incoming inquiries from field contractors, tradespeople, and industrial clients. In these sectors, quoting remains predominantly manual, requiring staff to cross-reference customer line items with internal enterprise catalogs, stock levels, and fluctuating supplier pricing.

To automate this workflow, Mercura deploys an infrastructure stack running TypeScript, Python, React, Next, Docker, Terraform, and Postgres. The machine learning pipeline relies on vector databases, language model embeddings, observability tooling, and automated evaluations to parse incoming customer documents, map parts to inventory, and generate structured quotes.

Founders Combining Trade Roots and Technical Research

The company was founded by four operators who bring a mix of domain experience and applied research:

• Lukas Bock, CEO, leads business development. Bock grew up in an HVAC and plumbing family with over a century of involvement in the trades, giving him firsthand experience with construction site operations. He previously worked as an AI engineer at Google X building machine learning pipelines, served as a data scientist at Allianz driving AI integration across approximately 60 international business units, and completed master’s work at the University of Cambridge.
• Stefan Zheng, CPO, heads product development. A former management consultant at Bain & Company, Zheng worked on operational efficiency across more than 15 manufacturing facilities. He previously conducted research at Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied at TU Munich, and worked in venture at Cherry Ventures.
• Sean Sdahl directs technical development. Sdahl was a silver medalist for Germany at the International Physics Olympiad, started research at the Max Planck Institute at age 16, and has published machine learning research.
• Hai Dang, Co-Founder and CTO, completed a doctorate in Human Computer Interaction at the University of Bayreuth and leads technical architecture.

Munich Expansion Across Engineering and Go-to-Market

To support its pipeline of industrial customers, Mercura has opened nine positions at its headquarters in Munich, Germany. All roles operate on-site.

On the technical side, the team is expanding its core infrastructure and custom customer integrations. Mercura is recruiting a (Senior) Fullstack Engineer to work across the application layer, alongside a (Senior) AI/LLM Engineer to build vector retrieval and model evaluation systems. Architecture leadership is open through a Staff Engineer vacancy, while client-facing delivery requires a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) and a Solution Engineer to integrate software into legacy customer databases and ERP environments.

On the commercial side, the team is scaling revenue operations with an Account Executive offering compensation between €110,000 and €160,000 per year. Pipeline generation and client retention will be handled by incoming hires for Business Development Representative (BDR), (Senior) Customer Success Manager, and a Founders Associate (Growth) working alongside executive leadership.

Open Roles at Mercura

See all open roles at Mercura