On June 25th, 2026, Plausion, an IEAI-mentored TUM startup, won Pitch Perfect 2026 at TUM Entrepreneurship Day.
Plausion automates construction invoice plausibility verification with AI. The platform takes a process that currently costs project controllers hours of manual work and compresses it into seconds. The human stays in the loop as the final decision-maker at every step. AI does what AI is good at: pattern matching, cross-referencing data across hundreds of invoice positions. The human does what humans are good at: exercising judgment in context.
For the IEAI, this is where our research meets practice. We follow TUM’s strategy for human-centered engineering, and Plausion gives us a real project to test what that means. When an AI system flags a discrepancy in a million-euro construction invoice, the question is not just whether the algorithm got it right. It is whether the person reviewing the result can understand why it was flagged, and whether the system is transparent enough for that trust to be justified. Aligning AI outputs with contractual logic, professional standards and the expectations of the people who depend on them is AI alignment in a very applied sense.
Construction is not a forgiving environment for errors. Invoices are checked against the VOB, BGB and project-specific contracts. A missed position or an incorrect cumulative total has direct financial and legal consequences. Building AI that operates reliably and accountably is what the IEAI was set up to work on.
Institute Director, Prof. Christoph Lütge, spent nearly a decade as Vice Chairman of the Ethics Committee of the Bayerischer Bauindustrieverband e.V. The governance questions that come with AI in construction are familiar ground for him. Dr. Auxane Boch, our Associate Research Director, works with the founding team on data governance, AI transparency and responsible system design.
Congratulations to Bilal Akarawatou, Nicklas Neubauer and Quentin Wiesmath, all three Technical University of Munich alumni. And a nod to TUM Venture Labs, UnternehmerTUM and TUM Incubator for the support that helps ventures like Plausion get from campus to market.
