UVC Partners backs Atira's $17.5 million round - a commercial operating system for complex B2B manufacturing

Munich, Germany, September 3, 2026 – Atira, a Munich-based AI company building the orchestration layer for industrial sales engineering, has raised $17.5 million led by Accel. UVC Partners, Fortino, Booom, and industry leaders including Ann-Kristin Achleitner, Marc Bitzer (CEO of the Whirlpool Corporation), Dr. Markus Flik (multiple industrial boards), and Bastian Nominacher (co-founder and co-CEO of Celonis) also participated in the round. UVC Partners first backed Atira in its $2.5M Pre-Seed round and has since significantly increased that commitment through its recent Seed round. The new funding will expand the company's go-to-market team, accelerate product development, and support international growth.

‍The problem: Manual processes for complex RFQs

Industrials selling complex, built-to-order products still rely on highly manual processes to respond to customer requests for quotation (RFQs). A single proposal can take anywhere from weeks to several months to prepare. It often requires sales engineers, legal teams, technical specialists, and commercial teams to collaborate, review hundreds or thousands of pages of specifications, and produce customized documentation that is integral to the order process before a bid can be submitted. This work represents more than $128 billion in annual global labor spend, much of which still depends on fragmented processes and expertise spread across teams.

Benjamin Erhart, General Partner at UVC Partners, said: "The prevailing assumption is that one system could solve this challenge for everyone – with real revenue impact for every customer. But the knowledge that actually wins deals only comes from a company's own bidding history, a memory that grows with every deployment. That's exactly what Atira's platform delivers."

The answer: an AI agent that operates end-to-end between CRM and ERP

Atira is building the agentic layer between CRM and ERP that coordinates and executes the commercial response process of industrials. Every complex B2B sales process involves a person, often called a Sales Engineer, Bid Manager, or Proposal Lead, who translates customer RFQs into structured responses, configures solutions, flags deal risks, and draws on years of institutional knowledge. Atira augments this function with an Multi-AI agent system that operates end-to-end through inbound screening, solution configuration and producing the respective outbound technical and commercial content. This complex knowledge is grounded in both founders' backgrounds: Florian Diegruber, previously a Commercial Lead at Palantir, and August DuMont Schütte, formerly a Software Engineer at Google, where he shipped LLM systems serving hundreds of millions of queries a day. The founders built Atira because they understood both sides of the process from the start.

Development of the company

Since launching commercially in 2025, Atira has signed over 15 clients, including enterprise customers such as ABB E-Mobility, Chiron Group, Rema Tip Top and Robel. Almost every one of these accounts was closed founder-led, with zero commercial headcount, largely through customers referring Atira to their own partners and suppliers. The company grew more than ten times 6 and is already seeing significant expansion within customer accounts. Its customer base spans mid-market leaders like Robel, Chiron Group, Theegarten-Pactec, and Fette Compacting, as well as global enterprises generating more than $1 billion in revenue. 

Early deployments are already delivering measurable commercial impact. Customers have reduced ask-to-bid times by up to 80% while using Atira to standardize proposal processes, preserve institutional knowledge, and help engineering teams focus on higher-value technical decisions. 

Florian Diegruber, CEO and Co-founder of Atira, said: "Sales engineering is one of the largest workflows in manufacturing that software has never truly supported. Today, critical commercial expertise is scattered across people, documents, and disconnected systems. Atira is changing that by helping industrials turn expertise into a scalable capability and bringing AI into one of the most important processes in industrial organizations. With the Seed funding round, we're accelerating our mission to become the commercial operating system for industrials." 

The new funding will support Atira's next stage of growth as it expands internationally, grows its commercial organization, and broadens its product offering across adjacent commercial workflows, including advanced ai configuration, pricing intelligence, aftersales, and supplier coordination.

About Atira

Atira is a purpose-built AI agent platform that automates sales engineering workflows for industrials selling complex, built-to-order products or services. The platform integrates with existing CRM, ERP and CPQ systems to automate RFQ-to-quote and dependent internal processes, helping industrials respond to opportunities faster while capturing institutional knowledge from historical proposals, improving pricing decisions and standardizing deal outcomes. Founded in Munich, Atira serves enterprise industrial customers across multiple sectors.

For more information, visit www.atira.ai

About UVC Partners

UVC Partners backs Europe’s most ambitious B2B tech founders building new category leaders. From DeepTech to AI, the firm has invested in breakout startups including Isar Aerospace, Proxima Fusion, Q.ANT, Aleph Alpha, Tacto, Flix, and FINN. With €800 million in assets under management, UVC Partners invests up to €15 million initially across multiple stages from early to growth. Over the lifetime of the investment, €30 million per company can be deployed. Beyond capital, UVC Partners' investment team is a "tech team for tech teams" – supporting founders in building and scaling market-leading companies. Through its unique access to UnternehmerTUM – Europe's leading innovation hub – the VC offers a powerful ecosystem of entrepreneurs, key corporate decision-makers, and top-tier researchers. UVC Partners' value-creation team provides direct access to a network of 1,000+ companies – potential customers and strategic partners.

For more information, visit www.uvcpartners.com