Volve raises $3M to bring AI to construction tendering across Europe
What's the deal? Oslo-based VolveDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has raised $3 million in seed funding to expand its AI construction tendering platform from the Nordics into the UK and continental Europe. Skyfall VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → led the round, with J12Dealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Norrsken EvolveDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, OBOSDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → Ventures, AntlerDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and StartupLabDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → participating. Angel backers include Daniel Kjørberg Siraj, former CEO of Nordic housing developer OBOS.
What's the endgame? Volve, founded in 2024, targets the tender stage — when it says 80% of a project's final cost is decided. Its platform maps a project's scope, requirements, and risks to produce complete tender and contract packages, helping contractors decide whether to bid, how to price, and which risks to accept.
Why now? The European construction sector spends more than €1.6 trillion a year, and tendering accounts for nearly one in five monitored public procurement procedures. Yet it remains one of the least digitised parts of the industry, still largely run on PDFs.
The scale is real. In one public infrastructure tender of 213 documents, Volve flagged 20 risks and helped compare 73 subcontractor bids. Nordic contractors already use the platform across more than 2,500 projects.
The founders: Chief executive officer Herman Smith is a civil engineer with over 10 years in construction, most recently chief digital officer at Norwegian consultancy MulticonsultDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. Co-founders Abyl Ikshanov, previously CTO at wheel.me, and Alf Jørgen Dovland, formerly of Capgemini InventDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, bring AI engineering and commercial experience.
"Construction is a project business: you have to win projects to stay in business, but winning on the wrong terms is worse than losing," Smith said. "Volve is built inside those decisions, and that is the category we are defining."
What could go wrong? The field is crowded. Dutch startup BrainialDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → works with HeijmansDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → on public tenders, while compatriot Altura raised €8 million in a 2025 Series A and acquired Tendara to build a full-service bidding platform for northern Europe. Volve argues its edge is a graph structure that reuses accumulated project knowledge for future tenders — turning "an archive into an asset," per Smith.
The signal: The bet fits a Nordic pattern of applying AI to capital-intensive, overlooked sectors. The region has produced more than 100 unicorns and over $500 billion in enterprise value on less capital than a typical US Series C — and construction tendering is exactly the kind of large, neglected market that model favours.
Read more: Tech Funding News
Image credit: EU-Ukraine cooperation
