Who will be the official provider of 220k condoms during the Olympic Games in Paris this summer? What organisation will be responsible for providing English classes to French parliamentarians from 2027? And which artisan business will be hired to renovate the three-centuries-old bed of King Louis XVI in the world-famous Versailles palace?
These are the kinds of public tenders that Hugues Renou, the cofounder of seven month-old startup Tengo, likes to keep track of.
Tengo’s platform centralises and analyses all calls for public tenders in France to help businesses spot and respond to relevant opportunities. It sees deals ranging from the mundane (replacing students’ chairs in schools) to the more unconventional (operating a merry-go-round in the coastal town of Banyuls-sur-Mer, with the capacity to also manage a game of Hook a Duck).
“The state really does a little bit of everything,” Renou tells Sifted.
Tengo, which launched last year from Paris-based startup studio Hexa, has just raised a €3m equity seed round led by German VC Point Nine. A number of business angels also participated in the round, including executives from some of Tengo’s customers.
A huge market
The French state currently spends €500m every day on public tenders in the form of services, construction and equipment, according to Renou.
Data from French market analyst Vecteur Plus shows that in 2023, the government spent a total €180bn on public tenders.
The market is only set to grow, says Renou: increasing public procurement, particularly for small and medium companies, is a key objective for the French government.
“The state has a real ambition to diversify where the money for public procurement goes,” says Renou. “It’s a way to support the economy by creating more demand.”
It’s a big opportunity for businesses — but with hundreds of thousands of calls posted every year on up to 200 different portals, making sense of it all can be a headache.
It’s not just about spotting a relevant deal; companies also need to carry out in-depth evaluations to make sure that they are technically and commercially able to answer to the different criteria laid out in any given call.
Renou, who launched two startups with his cofounder Yoann Gauthier before Tengo, has first-hand experience.
“Answering a call for tender is a nightmare,” he says. “Everyone hates having to deal with it.”
What does Tengo do?
Tengo has several dozen customers, according to Renou, who pay a monthly fee to access the platform.
They include startups like French edtech OpenClassrooms and large corporations like retailer Carrefour, as well as more traditional SMEs.
“One of our clients installs fax machines in the south of France, and another one deploys fibre-optic internet in Normandy,” says Renou. “We are very sector- and profile-agnostic.”
The startup centralises all calls for tenders issued by the state on its platform and uses AI to detect opportunities of interest for a given business.
It analyses individual tenders to make sure there is a match between the expectations of the buyer and the company’s services.
It’s also testing out a tool which produces documents in response to a call, such as descriptions of the respondent’s business and methodology — which it plans to expand now the fundraise is in the bag.
For now, Tengo is focused on France, but it will look to expand internationally in the medium-term, says Renou.
“Across the EU, the budget for public procurement is 10 times that of France,” he says. “What we are doing in France will eventually be replicable at the European level.”
