Sometimes you meet a team and you just know. 

When we first learned last year about Tacto co-founders André Petry, Nico Bentenrieder and Johannes Groll and the procurement solution they were building, we already had a keen interest in the category. While businesses have for decades used CRMs (customer relationship management systems) to grow their revenue, where was the SRM (supplier relationship management system)? More attention to the supplier and cost side of the equation was clearly needed, as geopolitical tensions, COVID ripple effects and regulatory changes have created unprecedented supply chain uncertainty and price volatility.

For the world’s largest companies producing physical goods, some supplier relationship tools are available via incumbents. But for millions of mid-sized businesses (SMBs), these options are too cumbersome and too expensive; 90% have no procurement solution at all. Instead, they’re stuck tracking every supplier, certificate and quote manually, in email and Excel. It’s a daunting proposition—especially when you realize that even a company making a seemingly simple product like tape might have hundreds of suppliers and procure tens of thousands of different articles.

Those mid-sized industrial companies are exactly who Tacto was built to serve, so in late 2022, we reached out to their team to discuss the possibility of a partnership. Unfortunately for us, they’d just finished raising their seed round. But we didn’t want to give up—so we started speaking with customers in the sector, hoping to learn more about the business. What we heard made us even more interested in the product André, Nico, Johannes and their team are building.

Customers told us Tacto had helped them streamline every aspect of the procurement process, from requesting, evaluating and responding to quotes; to tracking suppliers’ regulatory certifications; to analyzing prices and preparing for negotiations. Where their employees once spent hundreds of hours on interviews, questionnaires and data entry, the platform now automatically gathers and standardizes that information—and of course, uses AI to help them make sense of it. Tacto has also dramatically simplified compliance with Germany’s new Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, which imposes stricter supplier reporting to every business with at least 1,000 full-time employees. Even better, it’s easy to integrate—no year-long sales cycles or big IT projects—and, thanks to André, Nico and Johannes’s insistence on an elegant, consumer-grade UI, it’s easy to use, as well.

But customers didn’t just sing the praises of Tacto’s product; we also heard amazing things about its team. André, Nico and Johannes have stellar credentials—all three met at the elite Center for Digital Technology and Management in Munich. They started Tacto in early 2020 after seeing the challenges of procurement firsthand, pushed ahead when skeptics in the space told them it wouldn’t work, and now, have stuck with it long enough to prove those skeptics wrong. They are high-energy, thoughtful and relentlessly focused on performance—and, importantly, they have an impressive ability to attract talent. Tacto’s team members deeply understand the problems their customers are facing, and they work quickly to solve them.

After hearing those rave reviews, we knew we had to try again—so we traveled to Munich to meet André face-to-face. We walked out of that first one-hour coffee with a high degree of conviction in Tacto, and a couple of weeks later, flew back to spend the day with the team and offer them a term sheet. Sequoia was far from the only firm vying for Tacto’s attention—but in that high-pressure environment, we saw for ourselves the qualities that make André, Nico and Johannes great leaders. We were thrilled that they chose us to lead their Series A.

Today, the future is bright. Tacto is now serving customers across a wide range of industries, from mechanical engineering to packaging to medical technology, and impressively, they have grown quickly while retaining every one of their happy customers. In the months and years ahead, as supply chain challenges continue and new regulations expand beyond Germany across Europe, André, Nico, Johannes and their team will be there to make life better and easier for even more companies—and we are excited to support them along the way.