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.
Diegruber previously worked as a commercial lead at Palantir, where he spent much of his time serving one of Germany’s large automotive manufacturers. He and August DuMont Schütte, a former machine learning software engineer at Google, began working together in mid-2024 on a broad thesis about reindustrializing Europe and the U.S. Half a year later they settled on quoting software, a category Diegruber notes “sounded very unsexy back then, which is always a good place to start a venture.” They incorporated Atira in Munich in November 2024.
His argument is that industry has focused on automating factory processes and ignored the “front of house” work needed to create industrial orders in the first place. “When you need six months for your sales cycle to go from request received to final proposal out, it’s great that you’ve automated a week or a month of your factory floor,” he told Fortune. “But the big chunk is on the front door.”
Atira’s platform plugs into a customer’s existing customer relationship management (CRM). enterprise resource planning (ERP), and configure-price-quote systems and deploys AI agents that read incoming requests, highlight key requirements, flag specifications the company cannot meet, then generates the technical documentation, configuration proposals, and pricing options that make up a bid.
Since launching commercially in November 2025, the startup has signed about 15 customers, Diegruber told Fortune. He said that all these customers are now using the system in full production, rather than simply experimenting with pilots, and that five of them have over 100 users each on Atira’s platform.
Among Atira’s customers are ABB E-mobility, the EV charging business that is majority-owned by European engineering giant ABB. Another customer is Chiron Group, the German industrial parts manufacturing firm, has more than 70 people using Atira’s software and reports that it’s able to process inbound quote requests 80% faster than before. (Markus Flik, a former Chiron Group CEO, is among Atira’s investors.) Meanwhile, railway equipment maker Robel says that Atira’s software is saving 95 hours of sales and engineering time per quotation request.
Several other companies are working on similar AI systems that speed up complex quotation processes, including Salesforce and ServiceNow. The major consulting firms are also helping their clients implement similar AI tools and the enterprise sales teams of AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Mistral are also looking to snag industrial customers. There are other startups in the hunt too, including Roadrunner, which recently raised $27 million from Silicon Valley venture firms Kleiner Perkins and Founders Fund.
But Diegruber said that he is not afraid of this competition. For one thing, he said, the business model of the consulting firms means that they often offer expensive software solutions that require a lot of time to implement. Other software, he said, can’t capture the tacit knowledge that exists within most industrial firms that is essential to getting quotes right. Atira’s AI agents ping human experts over Microsoft Teams to resolve questions no document can answer.
“I always like to joke, if you give Claude to 20 sellers, you still get 20 different answers,” he said, referring to Anthropic’s chatbot. “So it’s really that aspect of scalability across the org versus just solving it for a single person.”
On accuracy—a persistent worry for enterprises deploying large language models—Diegruber said Atira builds dedicated front ends for different types of agents, and that when users review the agents’ answers, the software shows its sources and requires a human to confirm each one. “You can’t just deploy an agent and say the agent now does the work that you’ve previously done manually,” he said.
Harry Nelis, a partner at VC firm Accel, said in a statement that developing quotes for complex manufacturing “involves huge amounts of unstructured information, technical judgement and knowledge spread across different people and systems,” which makes it hard to automate with conventional software. “AI changes that equation because it can understand that context and orchestrate work across the entire process,” Nelis said.
Atira’s traction is notable given the received wisdom that European industrial giants are slower than American ones to buy from startups. Diegruber thinks attitudes among European industrial executives are shifting and that they are increasingly willing to take a risk on a startup’s software. He also said that it helps that Atira uses a deployment model that gets customers up and running within a day or two and lets them cancel after a month. “Luckily, so far this has never happened,” he said, referring to the later scenario.
The money Atira has raised in its latest venture capital round will go mostly into engineering and the company’s first non-founder commercial hires, Diegruber said. Atira had just four employees at the start of the year and has about 15 now, with nine more due to start soon. The company is also eyeing the U.S., where it has a first customer in a pilot, he said.
