Exclusive: German startup Atira raises $17.5 million to streamline cumbersome industrial sales process
Fortune Jeremy Kahn ● Covered by 2 sources
Munich startup Atira raised $17.5 million to automate industrial bids. It wants AI to replace the weeks of back-and-forth before a quote goes out.
Based on reporting by Fortune, Jeremy Kahn — read the original for the full story.
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A Munich startup thinks one of manufacturing’s messiest jobs is finally ready for software. Atira has raised $17.5 million to automate the bid-writing grind that kicks off when a company like a fire-truck maker or EV charger supplier gets a big request for proposal stuffed with technical detail.
The round includes a $15 million seed led by Accel and a previously undisclosed $2.5 million pre-seed. UVC Partners, Fortino and BOOOM also backed the company, along with individual investors such as Whirlpool chief executive Marc Bitzer and Bastian Nominacher, the co-founder and co-CEO of Celonis. Atira didn’t say what valuation it got.
Atira’s pitch is straightforward: sales engineering eats a huge amount of labor, and much of it is still done by hand. The company estimates that work at more than $128 billion in annual spending worldwide. Its software connects to a customer’s CRM, ERP and configure-price-quote systems, then uses AI agents to read incoming requests, call out missing requirements, identify specs the company can’t meet and assemble the technical documents, configuration proposals and pricing options for a bid.
Cofounder and CEO Florian Diegruber argues manufacturers have spent years automating the factory floor while leaving the “front of house” untouched. He founded Atira in Munich in November 2024 with August DuMont Schütte, a former Google machine learning engineer, after the two started working on a broader idea about reindustrializing Europe and the U.S. Atira went commercial in November 2025 and says it now has about 15 customers, all in full production. Five of them have more than 100 users on the platform.
The early customer stories are the kind startups love to put in a deck because they sound painfully familiar. Chiron Group says it can process inbound quote requests 80% faster with Atira. Robel says the software saves 95 hours of sales and engineering time per quotation request. ABB E-mobility is also a customer. And Atira is already pushing into the U.S., where it has a first customer in pilot. The new money will mostly go into engineering and the company’s first non-founder commercial hires, with the headcount set to rise from about 15 now to 24 soon.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is exactly where AI belongs: not in another chatbot demo, but in the annoying middle of enterprise work that nobody enjoys and everybody pretends is “core process.” The neat part is that Atira isn’t selling magic; it’s selling speed, controls and a way to spread tacit knowledge across a company before one expert becomes the bottleneck. That’s a much better bet than chasing flashy automation that collapses the moment a real customer sends a messy PDF.
Read more about this at: Fortune
