Altura, a full-cycle bid management software that combines data with technology for a winning proposal process, announced a €3 million funding round led by Curiosity VC with participation of Fortino Capital.
With the growth money, Altura will further improve their software. There will be a significant investment in tech talent to expand the platform. The plan is to implement more products and provide even more quality support to create a perfectly streamlined process. Founded in 2019, Altura launched the first version of its software two years ago.
Matthijs Huiskamp, founder and CEO Altura, said: “I see inefficiency in how companies and governments do business with other parties. This is because there is so much manual work and unnecessary steps. With the knowledge and automation in our software, those factors are removed and with that there is more room for vision, creativity, strategy and focus. AI plays the leading role in this.”
Bid management is now subject to AI disruption. That means the manner in which big companies do business and how the government spends is going to be changed. In five years, the field of RFX and procurement will look completely different. Altura is using AI to embrace and accelerate that change. All manual tasks will be solved with artificial intelligence and contextual data from companies. That leaves more time for the work that really matters.
The bid management software uses Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Custom Prompting. Vector database technology and Graph database technology is deployed. Thus, Altura’s software can support every step, providing a complete proposal process, from identifying new opportunities to project management and data analysis. The software can scrape product data from platforms, very accurately scan information from documents, estimate financial risks, summarise and organise content in a knowledge library. Based on the information found in the documentation, automated actions are created such as a schedule, task list, text for the proposal and other content. This significantly reduces manual tasks.
Increasingly, government agencies, as well as private and public organisations, are using formal procurement processes such as a Request for X (RFX) to find a supplier for their contract. These processes are known for their complexity and the enormous amount of documentation required of participants. Altura has developed software to simplify the entire process around creating and managing proposals with the help of AI. In the coming years, this development promises to dramatically change interactions between governmental organisations and companies, as well as business-to-business collaborations.
Wouter Goossens, Investment Director at Fortino Capital, commented: “We see that companies are increasingly buying through RFXs. Matthijs and Jordi have the ambition to become category leaders with software to make bid management more efficient and effective. This objective and the speed at which the company is currently growing really appeal to us.”
Herman Kienhuis, managing partner at Curiosity VC, added: “We have researched the entire market in the field of AI in bid software and see that Altura is the best party. They use new AI technologies for finding and analysing tenders and RFXs, for automating time-consuming manual tasks and also as an assistant for proposal writing. This growth capital will allow them to accelerate their product development and commercial rollout.”
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2024/03/utrecht-based-altura-raises-e3-million-to-disrupt-the-bid-management-process-with-ai/
