We Analyzed 3,000 EU Tenders. Here's What Surprised Us.

We're building BidScout — a tool that helps small businesses find public tenders across Europe. Part of building that meant writing a pipeline that pulls tender notices from TED, the EU's official procurement database, every day. After a few weeks of running it, we had over 3,000 tenders sitting in a Postgres database. So naturally, we started poking around.

This isn't a scientific study. It's a snapshot — a few weeks of data from one source. But even a snapshot can be revealing when you've never actually looked at this stuff up close before.

Germany publishes more tenders than anyone. By a lot.

This was our country breakdown for the tenders we collected:

• Germany: 483
• France: 281
• Poland: 228
• Spain: 182
• Italy: 102
• Czech Republic: 97

Germany at the top isn't shocking — it's the biggest economy in the EU. What surprised us was the margin. Germany published nearly twice as many tenders as France and more than double Poland. And remember, these are only the above-threshold notices that make it to TED. Germany also has one of the most fragmented national procurement landscapes in Europe — the federal portal plus 16 separate state-level platforms. The below-threshold volume must be enormous.

Czech Republic showing up with 97 tenders was genuinely interesting to us. For a country of 10 million people, that's a lot of public buying happening at EU-reportable scale. If you're an SME in Central Europe and you're not watching Czech procurement, you're probably leaving opportunities on the table.

Most tenders are for services, not things

This one caught us off guard. When people think "government procurement," they tend to picture physical goods — office furniture, medical supplies, vehicle fleets. The actual breakdown:

• Services: 865
• Supplies: 730
• Works: 406

Services is the biggest category. IT consulting. Legal advice. Translation. Cleaning. Training. Auditing. Facility management. Governments buy a huge amount of expertise, and that's exactly the kind of contract that suits smaller companies. You don't need a factory or a warehouse — you need skills and availability.

The works category (construction, infrastructure) being the smallest surprised us less once we thought about it. Works contracts tend to be bigger in value but fewer in number, and they're more likely to go to large construction firms with the bonding capacity and equipment to deliver.

Some deadlines are three years away

We expected tenders with deadlines a month or two out. What we found: deadlines ranging from a few days to January 2029. Three years from now.

These long-horizon notices are typically prior information notices or framework agreements — essentially, a government saying "we're going to need X over the next several years, here's a heads-up." They're not always something you bid on immediately. But they're incredibly valuable for planning. If you know that a German state is going to spend €10 million on IT modernization over the next three years, you can position your company now — build the right partnerships, get the certifications, put yourself in front of the right people.

Most businesses never see these because they only search for tenders with imminent deadlines. That's understandable, but it means they're always reacting instead of preparing.

The language problem is worse than we thought

We knew going in that language would be a barrier. Tenders are published in the local language. But actually seeing it in the data made it feel more real.

A German tender might have an English title on TED, but the actual specifications — the 60-page document you need to read to write your bid — are in German. A Polish municipality isn't going to translate their requirements into English for you. And the formal procurement vocabulary is a whole dialect of its own. Even native speakers sometimes struggle with the way governments describe what they want.

This is where we think AI can actually help in a non-gimmicky way. Not writing your bid for you (please don't do that), but summarizing what a tender is actually asking for in plain language, regardless of the source language. We built this into BidScout — every tender gets an AI-generated summary that pulls out the key points: what they're buying, who can bid, how they'll evaluate proposals, and when it's due. It takes a 60-page German PDF and gives you five bullet points in English so you can decide in 30 seconds whether it's worth your time.

CPV codes are bizarre and wonderful

Every EU tender is tagged with CPV (Common Procurement Vocabulary) codes — standardized categories like 72000000 for IT services or 45000000 for construction. In theory, they make tenders searchable and comparable across countries and languages.

In practice, they're a world unto themselves. There are CPV codes for "Snowploughs and snowblowers" (43313100), "Taxidermy services" (98393000), and — our personal favorite — "Torpedo tubes" (35512400). The vocabulary has over 9,000 codes organized in a hierarchy that makes sense once you learn it, but looks like a fever dream when you first encounter it.

The useful insight here: most businesses fit into 3-5 CPV codes. Once you find yours, they become the single most reliable way to filter through the noise. Better than keyword search, which breaks across languages. Better than browsing by country, which gives you everything. Your CPV codes are your procurement fingerprint.

The real takeaway: the data is there, the access isn't

The thing that stuck with us after looking at all this data is how stark the gap is between "publicly available" and "practically accessible." Every one of these 3,000+ tenders is technically public. Anyone can find them on TED. They're published by law.

But "published" doesn't mean "accessible" in any meaningful sense. The data is scattered across platforms, written in a dozen languages, buried in formal procurement jargon, and organized by classification codes most people have never heard of. The small building contractor in Budapest who could absolutely deliver a renovation project for a Czech municipality is never going to find that tender. Not because it's hidden — because the friction is too high.

That gap between public and accessible is what we're trying to close. Not by creating something new, but by making what's already there actually usable.

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