Volve lands $3M to expand construction tendering AI across Europe

Norwegian tech firm Volve has secured $3 million in seed funding to bolster its construction tendering intelligence platform and expand its reach across Europe. The $3 million round, led by Skyfall Ventures, saw participation from J12, Norrsken Evolve, OBOS Ventures, Antler, StartupLab, and angel investors such as Daniel Kjørberg Siraj.

Volve, founded in 2024 by Herman Smith, Abyl Ikshanov, and Alf Jørgen Dovland, specializes in an AI-driven platform for contractors and public-sector clients involved in tendering and preconstruction. The platform assists in making critical commercial decisions before construction begins, such as deciding whether to bid for a project, pricing it, and assessing associated risks.

Construction tender teams commonly face tight deadlines while sifting through extensive contracts, drawings, and technical specifications. Volve's AI analyzes this documentation, mapping relationships between requirements, project scope, and potential risks, providing teams with a structured view of the information to build bids.

Volve's platform also helps contractors align bids with client evaluation criteria and review subcontractor offers. Around 80% of a project's cost is determined before a contract is signed, underscoring the importance of tendering and preconstruction in shaping project margins and risk. Despite this, these stages remain relatively untapped in terms of digital transformation.

The construction industry in Europe alone represents over €1.6 trillion in annual investment, with construction contracts accounting for nearly one-fifth of public tenders. Herman Smith, Volve's co-founder and CEO, emphasizes that project margins are heavily influenced by commercial decisions made pre-construction, often based on thousands of pages of interconnected documentation reviewed under tight schedules.

Volve's platform is currently used by main contractors and public clients across the Nordics and is set to expand its presence in the UK and Continental Europe. To leverage the new capital, Volve is rolling out a new graph-based structure to retain and connect knowledge across projects, helping teams avoid starting from scratch for each new bid.

The additional funding will be used to enhance Volve's product offering for main contractors and public clients, as well as accelerate its expansion into European markets. The company aims to position its platform as an intelligence layer for commercial decision-making throughout the tendering and preconstruction processes.