- The company Volve has raised $3 million in order to expand its AI-driven construction tendering platform in the UK and Europe.
- The company focuses on the tender stage, when approximately 80% of the project costs are determined.
- Volve has managed tenders involving as many as 213 documents and has compared the bids of 73 subcontractors for a single project.
Volve, an AI platform company based in Oslo that is involved in construction tendering and the preconstruction phase, has secured $3 million in seed funding with a view to expanding its operations from the Nordic countries into the UK and Continental Europe.
Skyfall Ventures led the funding round, with J12, Norrsken Evolve, OBOS Ventures, Antler, and StartupLab also participating. Among the angel investors was Daniel Kjørberg Siraj, who had previously been CEO of OBOS, one of the largest housing and urban development companies in the Nordics.
“Construction is a project business: you have to win projects to stay in business, but winning on the wrong terms is worse than losing. Those margins are decided in commercial decisions taken before ground is broken, across thousands of pages of interconnected documents, under time pressure. Volve is built inside those decisions, and that is the category we are defining,” said Herman Smith, co-founder and CEO of Volve.
Volve claims that 80% of a project’s final cost is determined during the tender phase, when teams examine hundreds of pages of specifications, drawings, and risk clauses under strict time limits. The European construction sector spends more than €1.6 trillion each year, and tendering accounts for nearly one in five of the public procurement procedures monitored. Even though it is a large part of the industry, tendering remains one of the least digitised areas.
From Multiconsult’s boardroom to launching a construction AI startup
Smith is a civil engineer with more than 10 years’ experience in construction and preconstruction, and most recently served as chief digital officer at Multiconsult, one of Norway’s largest engineering consultancies.
Volve was founded in 2024 by Smith, Abyl Ikshanov, and Alf Jørgen Dovland and is based in Oslo. Ikshanov brings AI engineering experience from his previous role as CTO at wheel.me, and Dovland contributes commercial knowledge gained at Capgemini Invent. The two of them combine practical tendering experience with technical AI skills.
Its platform produces complete tender and contract packages by mapping out the scope, requirements, and risks of a project. This enables contractors to decide whether to submit a bid, set their prices, and evaluate which risks they are willing to take on.
In the most recent public infrastructure tender, which involved 213 documents, Volve identified 20 risks and assisted in comparing 73 subcontractor bids; furthermore, leading contractors from the Nordic region already utilise the platform on over 2,500 construction projects.
A crowded field, but a compounding-knowledge pitch
Brainial, based in the Netherlands, identifies tender risks and requirements for public tenders in the Netherlands and across the EU and collaborates with Heijmans. Similarly, the other Dutch company, Altura, raised €8 million in its Series A financing in 2025 and acquired Tendara to create a full-service bidding platform covering northern Europe, employing autonomous agents to assist firms in winning tenders.
Although other tools regard each tender as a separate document-processing task, Volve uses its new graph structure to draw on the project knowledge it has accumulated for future tenders; according to Smith, this transforms an archive into an asset.
The Nordics have generated more than 100 unicorns and achieved an enterprise value of over $500 billion, using less capital than is typically invested in a single US Series C financing round, largely by focusing on capital-intensive sectors and applying AI to neglected areas.
An example of this strategy is construction tendering: it is large-scale, has been largely overlooked by current AI trends, which are mainly aimed at consumers, and is still handled using PDFs and reliance on institutional memory.
Espen Malmo, managing partner at Skyfall Ventures, believes construction to be one of the major sectors around the world that still lacks a commercial intelligence component: “Volve has been designed specifically for this purpose: it enables decision-making teams to work with tender documents that they can trust and transforms accumulated project knowledge into an asset instead of keeping it as an archive. The company has already secured contracts with the most prominent construction firms in the Nordic region and is now working with some of Europe’s largest contractors.”
Emmet King, co-founder of J12, cited the complexity of the domain as the explanation for why general-purpose AI tools have not yet overcome this issue: “Volve team brings both in-depth knowledge of the domain and outstanding technical ability to assist contractors in making better commercial decisions before any projects start, and we think they are well placed to establish this area.”
The company will use the funds to improve its platform for main contractors and public clients and strengthen its position in the UK and Continental Europe. Whether Volve can cope with the UK and Continental European procurement rules, which differ greatly from country to country, is a question the company has not yet had to face on a large scale.
