Altura’s Series A and what’s next

I am thrilled to announce our €8M Series A funding round, led by Octopus Ventures and with continued support from Fortino, P1ST, and Curiosity.

What we believe the future will look like

Our belief has always been two-fold: 1) Bid management should have a central role in organisations, and 2) Bid management data is an untapped source of strategic advantage.

This inspired us to create the first comprehensive bid management platform, designed to support bid teams at every stage of the process and effectively capture valuable data. Over the past few years, we’ve integrated powerful AI capabilities into Altura's platform, enabling automated document analysis and proposal writing. Most recently, we’ve introduced advanced dashboards that turn this data into actionable strategic insights.

However, the landscape has rapidly transformed over the past year. Bid professionals have increasingly embraced versatile AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot to augment their professional and personal tasks. With Large Language Models (LLMs) continuing to advance - and potentially even approaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) soon - AI assistants are poised to become indispensable, fundamentally reshaping the way bid management operates.

At Altura, we recognise that the primary challenge in bid management isn't merely crafting a compelling proposal. Instead, it's about optimising internal collaboration to distil raw data into strategic insights and informed decisions; this constitutes 90% of the effort required. The remaining 10%, transforming these insights into a compelling narrative, is already efficiently handled by today's sophisticated LLMs. Looking ahead, we foresee collaboration dynamics undergoing significant changes as specialised AI agents increasingly integrate into daily bid management workflows.

Introducing the Bid Agent Operating System ‘Bid OS’

To capture this vision, we're doubling down on our commitment to streamline bid processes and amplify strategic collaboration by becoming the first Bid Agent Operating System. Three strategic principles will guide our next steps:

1. Context is the new compute: Every data point enriches our Knowledge Fabric, enabling smarter AI-driven decisions.
2. Humans stay in the loop: Our AI is designed to enhance human expertise, ensuring control, transparency, and continuous learning.
3. Agents-native technology: Altura is purpose-built to enable autonomous AI agents to deliver maximum value.

As AI becomes ubiquitous, the real competitive edge will come from platforms like Altura, which effectively integrate AI with rich context, feedback loops, and seamless human-agent collaboration. Each incremental AI advancement translates into exponential gains in speed, win rates, and strategic insights.

Our latest step forward

Recently, we've launched two powerful new engines to supercharge our platform:

• Intelligent Bid Book: The first Bid Book that easily collects and structures critical information from multiple sources. It helps engage effortlessly with internal experts and stakeholders, transforming structured data into valuable insights and informed decisions. Each interaction enhances the system’s intelligence, continuously improving accuracy and efficiency, so every subsequent bid requires less effort.
• Bid Companion: One conversational AI companion that turns every Altura project and document into instant insights, auto-generated answers, and ready-to-use proposal copy. Bid Companion searches, summarises, writes, and answers for you — instead of asking colleagues— so bid teams spend less time chasing information, more time perfecting strategy, and win more deals..

Together, these tools create a powerful feedback loop, continually improving your team's bidding efficiency and effectiveness.

Why Octopus Ventures

Throughout our fundraising, Octopus Ventures stood out. They share our long-term vision, bring a vast network of resources, and, importantly, their team challenged us to think bigger and smarter from day one. Their deep SaaS expertise has already enhanced our strategic roadmap, making this partnership an exciting foundation for Altura’s next growth phase.

We're also excited to announce our newly formed board, tasked with strategic oversight and ensuring we execute effectively. Joining Jordi van der Hek (my amazing co-founder) and me are Uthish Ranjan (Octopus Ventures) and Wouter Goossens (Fortino Capital). For the fifth seat, we are actively seeking an experienced SaaS leader to fill the Chairman role, adding further strategic expertise to our board.

Gratitude

Before signing off, I want to take a moment to thank everyone who believed in us from the very beginning: the early customers who stood by us as our product evolved and improved; the pioneering employees who took a leap of faith, leaving behind the comfort of their previous roles; our investors who saw Altura’s potential when it was still just an idea. Most importantly, my deepest gratitude goes to our incredible team, whose dedication and hard work make everything possible every single day.