Atira, a Munich-based startup, has raised $17.5 million in venture capital to automate one of manufacturing's most stubbornly manual processes: turning a customer's technical request into a priced bid.
The company closed a $15 million seed round led by Accel, alongside a previously undisclosed $2.5 million pre-seed. UVC Partners, Fortino, and BOOOM also invested, along with individual backers including Whirlpool chairman and CEO Marc Bitzer and Celonis co-founder and co-CEO Bastian Nominacher. Atira declined to disclose its valuation.
Atira estimates that industrial 'sales engineering'—converting requests for bids into technically viable, priced proposals—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,' said cofounder and CEO Florian Diegruber.
Diegruber, a former commercial lead at Palantir who served one of Germany's large automotive manufacturers, founded the company with August DuMont Schütte, a former machine learning engineer at Google. The two began working together in mid-2024 and incorporated Atira in Munich in November 2024.
The platform plugs into a customer's existing CRM, ERP, and configure-price-quote systems, deploying AI agents that read incoming requests, flag specifications the company cannot meet, and generate technical documentation and pricing options. When no document holds the answer, the agents ping human experts directly over Microsoft Teams.
Since launching commercially in November 2025, Atira has signed roughly 15 customers, all now in full production rather than pilot testing, Diegruber told Fortune. Five customers have more than 100 users each. Customers include ABB E-mobility, the EV-charging unit majority-owned by ABB, and Chiron Group, a German industrial parts manufacturer with more than 70 users, which reports processing inbound quote requests 80% faster. Railway equipment maker Robel says the software saves 95 hours of sales and engineering time per quotation request.
Competition is building. Salesforce and ServiceNow are developing similar tools, major consulting firms are helping clients implement comparable AI systems, and enterprise sales teams at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Mistral are chasing the same industrial customers. Startup rival Roadrunner recently raised $27 million from Kleiner Perkins and Founders Fund. Diegruber argues that consulting-firm software is expensive and slow to implement, and that competitors lack the tacit institutional knowledge his agents are built to capture.
The numbers come first: a $128 billion labor bottleneck, an 80% speed gain at one customer, 95 hours saved at another. No regulator mandated this efficiency — private capital identified an inefficiency in industrial bureaucracy and funded a fix for it.
That is the pattern Europe's economy needs more of. Diegruber and DuMont Schütte built their thesis around reindustrializing Europe and the United States, and they are doing it not through subsidy programs but through venture capital chasing a return. Capital rewards clear rules and real productivity gains, not political mandates. If Atira's customers keep cutting weeks of paperwork into days, the lesson for policymakers in Brussels and Berlin is simple: get out of the way and let markets clear the bottleneck governments never could.
