Procurement

Vienna Start-up Polytender Wants to Build the World’s Largest Tender Platform With A.I.

co-produced by AI02. November 2026, 10:16

Polytender founders Dima Rubanov and Matthias Neumayer standing on a street in Vienna, black and white — Dima Rubanov and Matthias Neumayer, the founders of Polytender. © Run Labs

Bedtime stories, election manifestos, PDFs and now public contracts: Dima Rubanov and Matthias Neumayer have launched yet another project. Their Vienna-based start-up Polytender aims to use artificial intelligence to build nothing less than “the largest tender platform in the world.” More than 400 companies have registered since the launch about two months ago, according to the founders.

From Bedtime Stories to Government Contracts

The duo, friends since their school days, are among the most prolific A.I. founders in Vienna. With their start-up heyQQ, they released Oscar, an A.I. app that tells children personalized bedtime stories. It grew into Oscar Stories, complete with LORA, a child-friendly A.I. model based on Mistral, and the open-source model Lorastral.

Along the way, they built several chatbots: FragdasPDF for students and companies, Fragdie.EU for the 2024 European Parliament election and FragdiePartei.at for Austria’s parliamentary election the same year. Today, the two run the start-up studio Run Labs in Vienna, which has now spun out Polytender.

For the new project, they bring industry experience. Mr. Rubanov spent more than a decade overseeing infrastructure and investment projects worth billions and took part in numerous tenders himself, according to the company. Mr. Neumayer is a lawyer who knows the contractual and regulatory side of public procurement.

How Polytender Works

The market is huge: Public authorities in the European Union award contracts worth more than €2 trillion every year, spread across hundreds of portals. Polytender pulls data from more than 300 official procurement portals in 31 countries, namely the 27 E.U. member states, Britain, Switzerland, Norway and the United States. On any given day, the platform lists about 90,000 open tenders. In Germany alone, it reads 32 federal, state and municipal portals.

Matching: Companies enter their website and receive matching contracts. Every night, a proprietary algorithm compares new tenders with search profiles across languages.
A.I. assessment: A.I.-generated summaries and a “bid or no bid” recommendation are set to follow soon.
A.I. assistants: Through its own MCP servers, every tender can be searched directly from Mistral Vibe, Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, letting companies build their own tender agents.
Bids: Next, Polytender wants to use A.I. to draft bid documents and is looking for pilot customers.

Early customers include ESSECCA, Point&, Helferline, AV-Professional and the German start-up Joulify. David Knapp, chief executive of AV-Professional, said Polytender significantly speeds up how his company searches for, evaluates and handles tenders.

Europe’s SpaceX Moment?

The founders are thinking big. Europe spends about 30 times more on public procurement each year than the entire European venture capital market, Mr. Rubanov said. In the United States, companies like SpaceX and Palantir grew big on government contracts, he added, and European companies and start-ups should have the same opportunity. Mr. Neumayer said the goal is to make tenders fit for the A.I. era and to build the world’s largest tender platform, developed and hosted in Europe.

To illustrate the problem, Polytender points to the European Court of Auditors. According to the court’s special report, about 42 percent of E.U.-wide tender procedures in 2021 received only a single bid. Many companies simply do not know which contracts they could win, the founders say. Next, tenders from large private companies are set to come to the platform, followed by markets beyond Europe and the United States.

Why Many Tenders Draw Only One Bid

Procurement experts do not necessarily agree that a lack of information is the main reason for weak competition. In a guest commentary published after the auditors’ report, the Vienna procurement lawyer Martin Schiefer attributed the many single bids mainly to the shortage of skilled workers: Many companies have enough work in the private sector, he argued, and the effort required to submit a bid is a deterrent. In his view, today’s procurement bureaucracy is killing competition. That effort is exactly what Polytender wants to tackle with A.I.-generated bid documents.

Polytender is not alone with the idea. The Italian start-up Cato raised €6 million in September for its A.I. platform, which finds and analyzes tenders and pre-fills bids. Barcelona-based Tendios raised €2 million last year, and other players include Tendium in Sweden, Stotles in Britain and auftrag.at in Austria.