On May 20, openProd.io took the stage at Infoshare 2026 in Gdańsk as one of ten finalists in the Pomeranian Startup Contest. Three minutes to pitch. Two minutes of jury Q&A. A booth in the innovation zone. And roughly 800 attendees at the largest tech conference in Central and Eastern Europe.

Here is what happened, what it validated, and what comes next.

Why we entered

openProd.io launched on February 21, 2026. Three months later, we had our first paying customer, and two conference appearances behind us (Pimcore Inspire in Salzburg and GRID#26 in Kraków). The product was working. The market signal was there. What we did not have yet was external validation from outside the PIM ecosystem.

Infoshare was the test. Not for a trophy, but for a question: does the problem we solve resonate beyond the audience that already knows what a PIM is?

The pitch in numbers

The Pomeranian Startup Contest uses a tight format. Three minutes on stage, two minutes of jury questions, scored on three criteria: business potential, product innovation, and presentation quality.

We built our pitch around the numbers that have consistently moved conversations in buyer meetings. A mid-market company onboarding 1,000 products from messy supplier files spends roughly 60,000 PLN in loaded labor costs and weeks of delays. Scale that to ten suppliers per year and the cost sits somewhere between half a million and two million PLN. Annually. Just on getting data into a system.

openProd replaces that process. A 48-page supplier PDF with approximately 80 products, the kind of file that takes 30 to 50 hours of manual work, runs through our multi-agent AI pipeline in 16 minutes. 128 product attributes extracted and structured. Confidence scores on every field so a human reviewer can make fast decisions. Cost: 72 euros versus 1,800 to 3,000 euros for the manual path. That is 25 times cheaper and 95 percent less time.

The jury heard those numbers in under three minutes. Based on the questions that followed, the math landed.

What we brought to the innovation zone

The booth in the innovation zone gave us two full days of face-to-face conversations with a different audience than we typically reach at PIM-specific events. Infoshare draws a broad mix: founders, CTOs, enterprise IT leads, investors, and developers. Most of them had never heard of PIM. Many of them had lived through the exact pain we solve, just framed differently.

Manufacturers described supplier onboarding bottlenecks that were blocking ERP rollouts. Distributors talked about seasonal catalogs that take months to integrate. E-commerce teams pointed to data quality as the reason their time-to-market keeps slipping. The language was different from what we hear at a Pimcore or Akeneo event, but the underlying problem was identical: raw supplier data is the bottleneck, and nobody owns the layer between the supplier file and the destination system.

That pattern, the same problem described in different vocabularies by different industries, is the strongest signal we have gotten so far that the category we are building is not a niche.

The competitive landscape from the outside

At PIM-focused conferences, buyers already understand the competitive map. They know Akeneo has Supplier Data Manager locked to its own ecosystem. They know Pimcore Copilot handles enrichment but not ingestion. They know Ergonode’s AI features are early-stage. They evaluate openProd against that backdrop.

At Infoshare, nobody asked about Akeneo SDM or Pimcore Copilot. Instead, they asked a more fundamental question: why does this layer not exist yet? That is a different kind of validation. When your competition is not other vendors but the assumption that manual work is the only option, you are operating in a category that has not been named yet.

We call it AI Product Data Middleware. At Infoshare, we tested whether that framing makes sense outside the PIM bubble. It does.

Traction update

For anyone tracking milestones: openProd.io is three months post-launch. Here is where things stand as of the Infoshare pitch.

First paying customer acquired in month one. Two prior conference presentations: a sold-out masterclass at Pimcore Inspire in Salzburg (April 14) and a talk at GRID#26 in Kraków.

The product handles PDF, Excel, and XML supplier files. It outputs structured, PIM-ready data via REST API to Pimcore, Akeneo, Ergonode, or any custom system. Average contract value sits at roughly 25,000 euros per year at 78 percent gross margin.

The Infoshare stage was the third time we presented publicly, and the first time outside a PIM-specific audience. Every time we put the numbers in front of a room, the response pattern is the same: the problem is real, the math checks out, and the follow-up questions are about implementation, not about whether the problem exists.

What comes next

Infoshare confirmed something we suspected but had not tested: the product data onboarding problem is not a PIM problem. It is a supply chain data problem that touches every company with a product catalog and external suppliers. That widens the addressable market significantly beyond what PIM-ecosystem events alone can reach.

The next milestones on the calendar: Produktdatengaudi in Sundern, Germany (July 7), targeting the DACH market with BMEcat, ETIM, and GS1 content. Product Hunt launch planned for June. And a growing partner program designed to put openProd into the hands of every European PIM agency that is tired of watching implementation timelines slip because of supplier data bottlenecks.

If your team is spending weeks cleaning supplier files before they ever reach your PIM, ERP, or e-commerce platform, book a demo and see the pipeline run on your own data. Sixteen minutes instead of thirty hours is not a marketing claim. It is a benchmark we reproduce on every call.