Startup Award at Procurement Summit 2026: first place for qado

At Procurement Summit in Hamburg on 24 and 25 June, qado won the Startup Award 2026: first place, voted for by the event's visitors. Our co-founder Nicolas Pardon presented the platform on the main stage on day one.

The award

Procurement Summit is Germany's leading trade fair and conference for procurement innovation. The Startup Awards are a fixed part of the programme on the main stage.

Here is how the Awards ran in 2026. The participating startups presented their solutions, each in a few minutes. The audience then voted via the event app, and the award ceremony followed later in the same day. The votes produce a full ranking of all participants. qado won it.

What matters here is who votes: not a closed jury, but the room. Buyers, consultants, vendors. A pitch in front of this audience forgives no omissions. When you describe a problem the listeners deal with themselves every day, you can tell within seconds whether the description holds up.

The second award in two weeks

It is the second award for qado within fourteen days. Just under two weeks earlier, we received the EY Supply Chain Now AI Procurement Award 2026 in Mannheim. There, a panel of procurement leaders from well-known corporations decided, having examined the software in assessment sessions. Closed, in-depth scrutiny on one side, an open community vote on the other: that both processes reached the same result within two weeks is the real feedback for us.

What we talked about in Hamburg

The problem we have been working on since founding the company in 2025. Companies negotiate millions in savings every year, and a substantial share of it never arrives in the profit and loss statement. The reason: nobody can check thousand-page contracts against every single invoice. qado sits as an intelligence layer on top of existing ERP and procurement systems and reconciles purchase order, order confirmation, invoice and delivery against the contract, line by line. The platform puts masses of data together that way. With our customers, that brings back 2 to 4 % of procurement spend.

"Pitching to an audience that works in procurement every day is the most honest test there is for a product like ours. That these are the people who voted us into first place tells us we are describing a problem the industry knows." – Nicolas Pardon, Co-Founder, qado

Thanks to the Procurement Summit team and to everyone who voted for us. Respect to the startups who shared the stage with us. Second and third place went to Erik Oberländer with Delvo and Wolfgang Lang with GuidedBuying.com.

Here you can watch Nicolas pitch qado on the main stage at Procurement Summit: