Atira, a Munich-based startup founded in November 2024, has raised $17.5 million in total funding to automate industrial sales engineering. The financing includes a $15 million Seed round led by Accel and a previously undisclosed $2.5 million Pre-Seed round. The company builds a multi-agent AI platform that handles the manual, time-consuming work of responding to complex requests for quotation (RFQs) for built-to-order products.
UVC, Fortino, and Booom also participated in the round. Individual investors include Ann-Kristin Achleitner, Whirlpool CEO Marc Bitzer, Markus Flik, and Celonis Co-Founder and Co-CEO Bastian Nominacher. The capital will expand Atira's go-to-market team, accelerate product development, and support international growth.
What the platform does
Atira's software ingests RFQ specifications - often hundreds or thousands of pages - and identifies key requirements, comments on them, configures appropriate solutions, and produces bid documentation. It connects with existing CRM, ERP, and CPQ systems. The output includes technical documentation, configuration proposals, pricing options, completed customer templates, and final proposals.
Co-founders Florian Diegruber and August DuMont Schütte launched the company after careers at Palantir and Google, respectively. Diegruber served as a Commercial Lead at Palantir, while DuMont Schütte worked as an ML Software Engineer at Google. Their platform targets a process that Atira estimates represents more than $128 billion in annual labor spending globally. Preparing a single proposal can take weeks or months, pulling in sales engineers, technical teams, legal staff, and commercial reviewers.
Early traction and customer results
Since its commercial launch in November 2025, Atira has signed more than 15 customers, including ABB E-Mobility, Chiron Group, Rema Tip Top, and Robel. Early users report reducing request-to-bid preparation times by as much as 80%. The platform is also helping companies standardize proposal processes and preserve institutional knowledge that otherwise lives in scattered documents and individual expertise.
Irfan Coskuner, Teamleader Tender Projects at Robel, said the company evaluated multiple providers. "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."
Atira is seeing expansion within existing accounts as deployments move beyond initial use cases. The company plans to broaden the platform into adjacent workflows including pricing intelligence, aftersales, and supplier coordination, working toward becoming a broader operating system for industrial commercial teams.
Why this matters for sales professionals
Industrial sales engineering has remained stubbornly manual despite decades of software adoption in manufacturing. Most tools have digitized records without automating the core coordination work. Atira's approach changes the unit economics of a proposal: instead of weeks of cross-functional coordination, a small team can produce a compliant, configured bid in days. For sales leaders, that means faster pipeline velocity and more time spent on high-value technical work rather than document assembly. Professionals looking to stay ahead of this shift can explore structured learning on AI for Technical Sales Representatives or browse broader AI for Sales resources.
"Sales engineering is one of the largest workflows in manufacturing that software has never truly automated," said CEO Florian Diegruber. "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."
Accel partner Harry Nelis pointed to the speed of customer adoption. "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," he said.
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