Atira

5 million dollars. 5 million dollar pre-seed round that had not been made public, as reported by Fortune on September 3, 2026. UVC Partners, Fortino, and BOOOM also participated, along with individual investors such as Marc Bitzer, Chairman and CEO of Whirlpool, and Bastian Nominacher, co-founder and co-CEO of Celonis. The company declined to disclose its valuation. Its approximately 15 industrial clients, including ABB E-mobility and Chiron Group, were closed by the two founders without a sales team behind them, and a good part of the new money will precisely pay for the first sales hires.

Accel, which leads the round, states in its announcement that all these contracts were closed with the founders at the helm and without a single person in the commercial area, largely because the clients themselves recommended the product to their partners and suppliers. Fortune reports that the new money will primarily go to engineering and the first non-founder commercial hires. The size of the company explains why this is noteworthy. Atira started 2026 with four employees, today it has around 15 and expects nine more additions, according to Florian Diegruber, co-founder and CEO, who spoke to Fortune.

With that team, it signed ABB E-mobility, the electric charger business majority-controlled by the ABB engineering group, and Chiron Group, the German industrial parts manufacturing firm, which has more than 70 people using the software. The portfolio extends to Latin America. Accel states that Rema Tip Top uses the platform with its sales teams in Australia, Brazil, and Chile, and that Chiron is taking it from Germany to the United States. Fortune also points out a detail about that client list. Markus Flik, who headed Chiron Group, is among Atira's investors.

Diegruber worked as a commercial manager at Palantir, where he served one of the major German automotive manufacturers. His co-founder, August DuMont Schütte, now CTO, was a machine learning software engineer at Google. They started working together in mid-2024 and founded Atira in Munich in November of that year. When a manufacturer of fire trucks, railway machinery, or electric chargers receives an invitation to tender, the package can contain thousands of pages of technical specifications, often in several languages and accompanied by drawings and standards.

Sales engineers, technical specialists, lawyers, and commercial personnel spend weeks or months poring over these documents before they can set a price. The platform connects to the CRM, ERP, and configuration, price, and quote (CPQ) systems that the company already uses. Its agents read incoming requests, mark important requirements, point out specifications that the manufacturer cannot meet, and generate the technical documentation, configuration proposals, and pricing options that make up an offer. When no document resolves a doubt, the agents write to a human expert via Microsoft Teams.

Regarding accuracy, a constant concern for companies deploying language models, Diegruber told Fortune that the software shows its sources and requires a person to confirm each answer. He also explained why simply distributing a general AI tool among the team is not enough: he joked that "if you give Claude to 20 salespeople, you still get 20 different answers," referring to Anthropic's chatbot. The figure most repeated in the announcement is a reduction of up to 80% in the time from request to offer. Accel presents it as something reported by clients, not as an independent measurement.

In Fortune, that number is attributed to a specific client. Chiron Group says it processes its incoming quote requests 80% faster than before. Robel, the railway equipment manufacturer, estimates a saving of 95 hours of sales and engineering work per request. The market size has a similar origin. eu. Accel adds that most manufacturers reject between 20% and 40% of incoming opportunities due to lack of engineering capacity, a fact that the fund also does not attribute to an external source. The company gave Fortune another reference that does not appear in its announcement.