When a company that builds fire trucks, rail-maintenance machinery, or electric vehicle chargers is invited to bid on a big contract, the request that lands in its inbox can run to thousands of pages of technical specifications. Developing the bid is traditionally a slow and stubbornly manual process: sales engineers, technical specialists, lawyers, and commercial staff pass documents back and forth for weeks, sometimes months, before a price can be quoted.
Atira, a Munich-based startup, wants to use AI to automate that work—and it has just raised $17.5 million in venture capital funding to make good on that vision.The company said it has closed a $15 million seed round led by Accel, along with a previously undisclosed $2.5 million pre-seed. UVC Partners, Fortino, and BOOOM also invested, alongside individual investors that included, among others, Whirlpool chairman and CEO Marc Bitzer and Bastian Nominacher, co-founder and co-CEO of process-mining company Celonis. Atira declined to disclose its valuation following the funding.
Atira estimates that industrial “sales engineering”—the work of turning a customer’s request into a technically viable, priced bid—accounts for more than $128 billion in annual labor spending worldwide. “Sales engineering is one of the largest workflows in manufacturing that software has never truly automated,” Atira cofounder and CEO Florian Diegruber said.
