Dutch startup Altura has secured €8 million in Series A funding to accelerate its growth and launch what it claims are the first autonomous AI agents designed to help organisations win more public and private tenders. The funding round, led by Octopus Ventures with participation from Fortino Capital, Curiosity VC, and P1ST investors, brings Altura’s total funding to €12 million since its founding in 2021.
Just a while back, we also reported about how a Lithuania-based Sintra raised $17M seed round to build AI helpers for small businesses. It’s an innteresting read too.
The company, which has established a strong presence in the Benelux region, is now opening a London office to expand its reach into the UK—a market where public sector procurement alone amounts to £350 billion annually. This move comes as UK public tenders have increased by 28% over the past three years, according to data from Find a Tender.
What does the startup do
As procurement processes grow more intricate, organisations are increasingly relying on formal tenders and Requests for Proposal (RFPs) to mitigate risk and ensure transparency. These processes, however, often require significant manual effort from bid managers, who must coordinate input from diverse teams—legal, compliance, technical, and more—while navigating lengthy submission requirements.
Altura’s research highlights the challenges faced by bid teams: 67% remain dissatisfied with their win rates, and 98% do not fully leverage available data throughout the bidding process. “Altura addresses inefficiencies in managing complex tender and RFP processes, often involving manual, repetitive tasks prone to errors and collaboration bottlenecks,” said Matthijs Huiskamp, Founder & CEO of Altura, in an email interview.
He added, “Studies suggest businesses lose up to 25% of potential revenue due to inefficient bid management. Altura significantly reduces manual workload, optimises decision-making, and improves win rates through automation and intelligent data analysis.”
Altura’s platform: From AI assistance to autonomous agents
Altura’s platform was launched in 2021 to centralise knowledge and streamline every stage of the bid management lifecycle. Over the past year, the company has integrated AI tools powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist with searching internal data, summarising information, and generating proposal content. The platform also automates tasks such as identifying relevant tenders, surfacing insights for bid/no-bid decisions, and analysing past performance to guide future strategies.
With the latest funding, Altura is introducing what it calls “agentic AI”—autonomous agents that not only assist users but also complete tasks and make decisions independently. “At Altura, we are turning the static bid book into an intelligent hub that connects sales, legal and every subject-matter expert while learning from each interaction,” Huiskamp explained. “Our autonomous AI agents draw on that collective knowledge to draft answers, flag risks and surface win-loss insights, freeing teams from copy-paste work so they can focus on strategy.”
Technology and differentiation in the bid management space
Altura positions itself as a comprehensive, end-to-end solution in a market traditionally fragmented by point tools. According to Huiskamp, “Altura’s platform integrates end-to-end bid management, allowing users to centralise critical information and streamline decision-making. Leveraging AI combined with insights from previous decisions, users can efficiently transform documents and other sources into curated, actionable information using our Intelligent Bid Book.”
A key differentiator is Altura’s “Bid Companion,” an AI-driven partner that helps teams craft proposals and make strategic decisions. The company’s roadmap includes further development of autonomous AI agents and deeper workflow integrations. “In the upcoming phase, our focus is on enhancing autonomous AI agents; AI capable of independently performing tasks, and deepening comprehensive workflow integrations, further setting Altura apart from other solutions in the market,” Huiskamp said.
Market landscape and competitive position
Altura operates at the intersection of several software categories: traditional proposal management platforms, tender spotting solutions, AI-powered proposal writing tools, and general project management software. While competitors in each segment address parts of the bid management process, Altura claims to be the only platform offering a fully integrated, end-to-end solution that covers opportunity identification, collaboration, strategic decision-making, and AI-driven bid writing and insights automation.
This holistic approach is intended to address the core pain points faced by bid teams—namely, the fragmentation of information and the inefficiency of manual processes. “Altura uniquely offers a fully integrated, end-to-end solution covering opportunity identification, collaboration, strategic decision-making, and AI-driven bid writing and insights automation. This comprehensive approach positions Altura as the sole full-cycle bid management platform in today’s market,” Huiskamp noted.
UK launch and beyond
The UK market, with its significant public procurement spend and recent regulatory changes under the new Procurement Act, represents a strategic opportunity for Altura. “We see the UK as a perfect next step for Altura. While AI is still in the early stages of adoption in bid management, the UK is one of Europe’s largest markets, with £350 billion spent annually on public sector procurement,” Huiskamp said in the press release. “With the new Procurement Act, we see an even bigger need for Bid Management software, since this will enable and encourage even more companies to participate in the tenders.”
Altura’s expansion into the UK is supported by the opening of a new London office. The company plans to further expand its market presence across the EU and, eventually, the US. Over the next three to five years, Altura aims to “expand its market presence, first the EU, followed by an expansion into the US market,” Huiskamp shared in the interview. Other objectives include enhancing autonomous AI agents, growing annual recurring revenue and customer base, and establishing strategic integrations and partnerships.
The Bid Agent OS: A vision for the future of bidding
Central to Altura’s long-term strategy is the development of a “Bid Agent OS”—a collaborative operating system that enables humans and autonomous AI agents to co-create winning bids. Huiskamp described the concept as resting on three pillars:
“Knowledge Fabric: A unified graph that ingests every document, decision, and interaction so agents can instantly retrieve the exact context they need.
Agent Orchestration: A layer that spins up specialised AI agents (e.g., Opportunity Scout, Qualification Analyst, Proposal Writer) and coordinates their reasoning and outputs.
Human‑in‑the‑Loop Workspace: An intuitive cockpit where bid teams steer, validate, and learn from agent activity, ensuring accountability and compounding insight.”
This approach, he argues, is essential as large language models become ubiquitous and competitive advantage shifts to systems that feed them rich context, capture feedback loops, and enable seamless collaboration between people and AI.
Know the founder and company culture
Altura was co-founded by Matthijs Huiskamp and Jordi van der Hek. Jordi previously founded a software development agency that delivered bespoke solutions for enterprises, while Matthijs led an innovation consulting agency focused on software-driven automation and organisational change. The two met in 2015 and later co-founded an entrepreneurial foundation and coworking space to support young entrepreneurs.
Diversity is a point of emphasis for the company. “In Altura, 30% of the team is female, and we take pride in having 12 nationalities,” Huiskamp stated. The company’s international team reflects its ambition to serve enterprise customers across multiple markets, including the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, and now the UK.
What we think about AI in procurement and bidding and Altura’s role in it
The procurement landscape is rapidly evolving as organisations seek to reduce risk, increase transparency, and drive value through competitive bidding. The adoption of AI and automation in bid management is still in its early stages, but the trend is accelerating. According to a 2024 Deloitte report, AI-powered procurement tools are expected to become standard for large enterprises within the next five years, driven by the need to manage growing volumes of data and increasingly complex requirements.
Altura’s focus on agentic AI aligns with broader industry trends. Autonomous AI agents are being explored across sectors for their potential to handle repetitive tasks, synthesise information, and support decision-making. In the context of bid management, these capabilities could help organisations respond more quickly to opportunities, improve proposal quality, and increase win rates.
Altura’s €8 million Series A funding and expansion into the UK mark a significant step in the evolution of AI-driven bid management. By integrating advanced AI capabilities—including autonomous agents—into its end-to-end platform, Altura aims to address longstanding inefficiencies in the tendering process and help organisations compete more effectively for both public and private sector contracts.
As procurement processes become more data-intensive and competitive, platforms that can centralise information, automate routine work, and provide actionable insights are likely to become indispensable. Altura’s approach—combining a unified knowledge base, agent orchestration, and human-in-the-loop collaboration—positions it to play a leading role in this transformation.
While the company faces competition from established proposal management and AI writing tools, its focus on full-cycle automation and strategic decision support sets it apart in a crowded market. As AI adoption accelerates across procurement and sales functions, Altura’s trajectory will be closely watched by both customers and competitors seeking to harness the power of intelligent automation in the race to win more business.
