Tengo untangles the chaotic world of public sector procurement with artificial intelligence

To have uses artificial intelligence to look, evaluate and reply to public tenders. It’s a software-as-a-service tool that helps corporations handle large-scale public tenders – kind of like that Govly in the USA Originally created in a startup studio Hexthe startup raised a €3 million funding round led by Point nine ($3.2 million at today’s exchange rate).

For most corporations, public tenders represent a big, untapped market because they require significant resources. In France alone, there are over 200 platforms where public tenders happen. Even should you discover opportunities, it can take time to create a solid application.

That’s why many corporations outsource this sort of work to freelancers or consulting corporations. However, Tengo believes that technology has the potential to simplify the entire public procurement value chain.

“In France, the government spends half a billion euros every day – government in a broad sense, including ministries, regions, departments, parapublic agencies, cities, etc.” Tengo co-founder and CEO Hugues Renou told TechCrunch. “Specifically, it’s about roundabouts, school chairs or a training service.”

Customers first create a public tender data file, defining their criteria. Tengo then scans all public portals hosting tenders to seek out latest tenders that meet these criteria.

Public tenders are often extremely precise to avoid corruption or overspending. So corporations often read documents that will be as much as 50 pages long and describe what the government is in search of.

One of Tengo’s clients is Open classrooms. “Tenders for training are published every day. However, they are only interested in training courses that are 100% online,” Renou said. Instead of analyzing documents, Tengo routinely identifies this element and 40 other criteria.

As you may guess, Tengo uses artificial intelligence to research the information contained in these documents. It can highlight key elements, but in addition confer with essential pages.

Like many modern software-as-a-service tools, Tengo also acts as a central repository for all things related to public procurement. Companies get an summary of all their current applications. Employees can add comments and share the offer with one other team member. Tengo customers may receive notifications about upcoming offer expiration and extensions.

And when it’s time to use, Tengo has built-in AI integration to generate documents. I’m sure many corporations already use ChatGPT or one other LLM-based chat assistant to take part in public tenders. But with Tengo integration, you don’t have to change to a different service.

Ultimately, Tengo hopes that many of Tengo’s customers will find a way to cooperate and submit a joint application to the public tender. “The government encourages SMEs to bid for public contracts because they have a level of expertise that large companies do not have, but also because it is a way to use public money to finance many more businesses in the economy,” Renou said.

The startup remains to be in its early days, having attracted only a number of dozen customers. But the company’s early clients include OpenClassrooms, Citron, Theodo and Carrefour Pro. Now let’s examine if this may turn working on this product right into a successful business, because in France there are over 40,000 corporations collaborating in public tenders.