BARC announces five finalists for the Start-up Award Data & AI 2026
BARC, the leading analyst firm for data, analytics and AI, today announces the five finalists of the BARC Start-up Award Data & AI 2026. The award recognises young companies that turn data and AI into measurable enterprise value. The winner will be announced live on stage at the DATA festival in Munich on 16-17 June 2026.
The finalists were selected by a jury of esteemed data and AI minds that brings together former Start-up Award winners, practitioners and data leaders from enterprises, and independent analysts. The jury based its decision on innovation, technical maturity, customer traction and market relevance.
This year’s shortlist spans Agentic AI for the Mittelstand, AI governance, AI search visibility, foundation models for supply chains and the open data platform stack, a cross-section of where the data and AI market is moving next.
The five finalists
99BOTS GmbH with Pulse DeepConnect, an Agentic AI platform that deploys autonomous business agents with more than 50 pre-built use cases across finance, operations and customer service, in production at customers including Fidelity, Allianz, R+V and MRH Trowe. More: 99bots.de
Entropy Data GmbH, a 2025 spin-off from INNOQ, with Entropy Intelligence, an AI governance and access layer that lets AI agents discover and query data products under patent-pending purpose-based access control, built natively on the open ODCS and ODPS standards. More: entropy-data.com
OtterlyAI GmbH with its AI Search Monitoring platform, which tracks brand and topic visibility across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity. More: otterly.ai
SOLISTIQ with Foundry, a time-series foundation model for inventory and supply chain planning, pre-trained on more than 30 companies and currently in pilot with 15 manufacturers and retailers in Germany. More: solistiq.ai
Stackable GmbH with the Stackable Data Platform, a Kubernetes-native open-source platform that bundles Apache Kafka, Spark, Trino, Druid, OpenSearch and HBase into one operable stack, in production at 18 enterprise customers. More: stackable.tech
A widening field
Carsten Bange, Founder and CEO of BARC, sees the shortlist as a marker for where the data and AI market is heading. “The 2026 finalists show that the data and AI start-up scene is professionalising fast and covering the full stack, from infrastructure and governance to Agentic AI and foundation models for vertical problems,” he says. “Selecting only five companies was genuinely difficult this year, which is the best signal we could ask for: buyers have more credible options than ever.”
About the BARC Start-up Award Data & AI
The BARC Start-up Award Data & AI honours young companies that deliver measurable value with data, analytics and AI. The winner will be announced live at the DATA festival in Munich on 16-17 June 2026. More information: barc.com/de/events/data-festival
Watch the final live
The BARC Start-up Award Data & AI 2026 final will be broadcast live from the DATA festival in Munich. Anyone can tune in to see the pitches and the winner reveal.
Livestream of the final: barc.com/events/barc-start-up-award/#livestream
