Atira, a Munich-based AI startup, has raised $17.5 million in venture capital funding to automate the labor-intensive process of industrial sales engineering. The funding includes a $15 million seed round led by Accel and a $2.5 million pre-seed round, with participation from UVC Partners, Fortino, BOOOM, and individual investors such as Whirlpool CEO Marc Bitzer and Celonis co-CEO Bastian Nominacher, according to fortune.com.
The startup aims to streamline the preparation of bids for complex industrial contracts, which typically involve thousands of pages of technical specifications and require weeks or months of manual work by sales engineers, technical specialists, lawyers, and commercial staff. Atira’s AI technology is designed to automate this workflow, which the company estimates accounts for over $128 billion in annual labor spending globally. CEO Florian Diegruber, who previously worked at Palantir, highlighted that sales engineering is a major manufacturing workflow that has not been effectively automated by software until now.
This funding round positions Atira within a growing field of AI applications targeting industrial and manufacturing sectors, where automation of complex document processing and technical workflows is increasingly critical. The involvement of prominent investors and industry leaders underscores the potential impact of AI in reducing time and costs associated with industrial dealmaking. Comparable investments in AI-driven industrial software reflect a broader trend toward digitizing traditionally manual and fragmented processes.
Atira has not disclosed its valuation following the funding. The company plans to use the capital to further develop its AI platform and expand its market presence in industrial sales engineering automation, a sector with an estimated $128 billion annual labor cost worldwide, as reported by fortune.com.