Learn how MARKT-PILOT started with a simple idea, grew from PRICERADAR to MP ONE, and became a pricing platform for machine manufacturers.
Innovation to Impact: The MARKT-PILOT Story
Tobias Rieker was doing what thousands of engineers across Germany's industrial machinery sector were doing every day: manually researching parts prices.
Hours of clicking through competitor websites, copying numbers into spreadsheets, trying to tidiously assemble a picture of the market.
As an industrial engineering student at Hochschule Esslingen, working at ILLIG packaging solutions GmbH, Tobias realized this was broken. How could anyone make smart pricing decisions when getting the data consumed all the time? "There has to be a way to automate this." That thought became MARKT-PILOT.
There has to be a way to automate this.
Building With the Industry
Tobias found a co-founder in Amin Oumhamdi, a fellow student at Esslingen. Together, they started building PRICERADAR, a tool that scanned the market and brought real pricing data to manufacturers who had been flying blind or relying on the cost-plus approach for all their parts.
They had an advantage: a mentor at ILLIG connected them with aftermarket leaders across the Maschinenbau industry. They weren't building in a vacuum—they were building with the people who would use it.
The Pandemic Pivot
March 2020. The world locked down. The MARKT-PILOT team moved into a flat together to accelerate their business. While others paused, they accelerated.
The audacity of what came next: after just over one year they acquired partners and customers accross the DACH-region, and they opened an office in Chicago. A German startup, born at a university near Stuttgart, expanding to the US. It worked. Two years later they were launching their second product PRICEGUIDE to convert the pricing data with pricing recommendations.
Investment Rounds of Global Scale
After the €6.3 million seed funding form Capnamic, the Series A brought in €40 million—one of the largest Series A investments in German history. What started as a frustrated student's idea had become something real.
MP ONE™: Today and beyond
PRICERADAR and PRICEGUIDE have evolved into MP ONE™. Starting as a platform with AI-backed market intelligence on millions of price points, MARKT-PILOT now offers a real pricing performance platform. From gouvernance, tracable pricing processes, integration with existing tools like ERP systems and a unique performance reporting, MP ONE is adapted to SMEs and enterprises looking to streamline their aftermarket pricing processes and shift from simple pricing to real pricing performance.
Today, 150 employees work across offices in Stuttgart and Chicago. The technology keeps evolving, but the mission stays simple: We make pricing effortless, so machine manufacturers can grow with confidence.
No more guessing. No more hours of manual research. Just real market data, when you need it. Know the marke. Win the moment.
It started with one person recognizing there had to be a better way. It grew because two students had the vision to build it. And it succeeded because they never stopped.