Exclusive: German AI startup Atira raises $17.5 million to unclog the paperwork bottleneck in industrial dealmaking

When a company that builds fire trucks, rail-maintenance machinery, or electric vehicle chargers is invited to bid on a big contract, the request that lands in its inbox can run to thousands of pages of technical specifications. Developing the bid is traditionally a slow and stubbornly manual process: sales engineers, technical specialists, lawyers, and commercial staff pass documents back and forth for weeks, sometimes months, before a price can be quoted.

Atira, a Munich-based startup, wants to use AI to automate that work—and it has just raised $17.5 million in venture capital funding to make good on that vision.The company said it has closed a $15 million seed round led by Accel, along with a previously undisclosed $2.5 million pre-seed. UVC Partners, Fortino, and BOOOM also invested, alongside individual investors that included, among others, Whirlpool chairman and CEO Marc Bitzer and Bastian Nominacher, co-founder and co-CEO of process-mining company Celonis. Atira declined to disclose its valuation following the funding.

Atira estimates that industrial “sales engineering”—the work of turning a customer’s request into a technically viable, priced bid—accounts for more than $128 billion in annual labor spending worldwide. “Sales engineering is one of the largest workflows in manufacturing that software has never truly automated,” Atira cofounder and CEO Florian Diegruber said.

Diegruber previously worked as a commercial lead at Palantir, where he spent much of his time serving one of Germany’s large automotive manufacturers. He and August DuMont Schütte, a former machine learning software engineer at Google, began working together in mid-2024 on a broad thesis about reindustrializing Europe and the U.S. Half a year........

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