Mercura

Lukas Bock grew up in a family business with over 100 years in plumbing and electrical trades. He watched his relatives crunch quotes by hand, the same way contractors have done for decades. Now he's making sure nobody in distribution and manufacturing has to do it that way again. Mercura just went through Y Combinator and they're using AI to automate the entire quote and order process for distributors and manufacturers.

Here's the thing about construction—it's a massive industry running on emails, Excel files, and PDFs that sales reps have to manually parse and turn into quotes. We're talking about millions of quotes being requested in completely unstructured formats. Mercura's AI reads all of it, extracts the relevant data, and generates accurate quotes in minutes instead of hours or days. They've already got customers in HVAC distribution, electrical manufacturing, and building materials.

Stefan Zheng, the CPO, came from Bain where he optimized operations across 15 manufacturing plants. This team gets industrial. They understand that the real money isn't in shiny consumer apps—it's in the boring infrastructure that keeps the construction world moving. Munich-based Mercura is now looking to expand their team and capture more of this massive market.