Atira raises USD $17.5 million for industrial AI sales

Atira has raised USD $17.5 million to expand its AI sales engineering platform for industrial companies, including a USD $15 million seed round led by Accel.

The Munich-based company also disclosed a previously unannounced USD $2.5 million pre-seed round. UVC, Fortino and Booom participated, alongside individual backers Ann-Kristin Achleitner, Marc Bitzer, Markus Flik and Bastian Nominacher.

Founded in 2024 by Florian Diegruber, former commercial lead at Palantir, and August DuMont Schütte, former ML software engineer at Google, Atira develops software for manufacturers handling complex requests for quotation. Its system is designed to process technical specifications, configure proposed solutions and produce bid documents for industrial sales processes.

Industrial groups selling built-to-order products often rely on teams across sales engineering, legal, technical and commercial functions to prepare responses to tenders and customer requests. These proposals can take weeks or months to complete, particularly when staff must review large volumes of specifications and fill out detailed customer documentation before submitting a bid.

Atira estimates this work accounts for more than USD $128 billion in annual labour spending globally. It argues that many manufacturers still manage the process through fragmented systems and internal expertise rather than dedicated software.

Customer growth

Since its commercial launch, Atira has signed more than 15 customers, including ABB E-Mobility, Chiron Group, Rema Tip Top and Robel.

Some customers are expanding their use of the software across their organisations after initial deployments. Early projects have reduced ask-to-bid times by as much as 80%, according to Atira.

Its platform works across CRM, ERP and CPQ systems and is intended to handle incoming customer requests, identify requirements and generate outputs such as technical documentation, configuration proposals and pricing options.

That places Atira in a segment of industrial software focused on digitising commercial workflows rather than factory operations. Manufacturers have spent heavily on automation and production systems, but many sales and tender processes still depend on manual coordination and specialist knowledge held by experienced staff.

A customer reference in the announcement highlighted both speed of implementation and fit with existing processes. "We have evaluated multiple providers offering AI Tender Processing and Requirement Engineering and Atira impressed us by their ability to really meet and enhance our current processes and a solution that was implemented and working productively within a week," said Irfan Coskuner, teamleader tender projects at Robel.

Use of funds

The new capital will support international expansion, hiring in the commercial team and further product development. Atira also plans to extend its software into related areas including pricing intelligence, aftersales and supplier coordination.

Accel's involvement adds a prominent investor to a young European software company targeting a specialised industrial market. The firm has backed a range of software businesses, and its support points to continued interest in AI companies focused on specific business processes rather than broad consumer tools.

Diegruber described the opportunity as a large operational workflow that has seen little software automation. "Sales engineering is one of the largest workflows in manufacturing that software has never truly automated. Today, critical commercial expertise is scattered across people, documents and disconnected systems. Atira is changing that by helping industrials turn expertise into a scalable capability and bringing AI into one of the most important processes in industrial organizations. With Accel's support, we're accelerating our mission to become the commercial operating system for industrials," said Florian Diegruber, chief executive officer and co-founder of Atira.

Early customer uptake was a key factor in Accel's decision to invest. "Many of the most important workflows in manufacturing still depend on manual coordination across teams, systems and documents. What impressed us about Atira was not just the scale of the opportunity, but how quickly the team translated their vision into a product that customers are already adopting and expanding across their organizations. Florian and August combine deep technical expertise with a strong understanding of industrial workflows, and we believe Atira is well positioned to become a foundational platform for industrial sales engineering," said Harry Nelis, partner at Accel.