Our Seed Investment in Atira: The AI Orchestration Layer for Industrial Sales Engineering
Factories have been automated for fifty years. The process in front of them, the conversation between a customer and a supplier, has barely changed at all.
When a complex industrial product gets sold, a customer sends hundreds of pages of unstructured specifications, often in multiple languages and accompanied by drawings, norms and compliance standards. Sales engineers, technical specialists, legal and commercial teams then spend weeks - even months - screening requirements, checking feasibility and preparing a response. Legacy software has never touched this work because the input is unstructured and the answer isn't known in advance.
That space between CRM and ERP, where the actual engineering work involved in a sales process happens, has never been systematically covered by software. This work represents more than $128B in annual labour spend globally, and the revenue it constrains is worth multiples of that.
From Inbound Response to Commercial Operating System
Atira is the AI orchestration layer that connects to a manufacturer's existing systems and runs the commercial response process end to end. It screens and processes every inbound request so critical requirements are never missed; configures and conceptualizes the right solution from the modules and options a company actually has; and produces the documentation that accompanies every complex deal, from supporting sales documents and custom machine documentation to long lists of norms and standards.
The result goes far beyond faster quotes. Customers report up to 80% shorter ask-to-bid times, turning responses that took weeks into days. But the deeper shift is capacity. Most manufacturers decline 20 to 40% of inbound opportunities simply because they lack the engineering bandwidth to respond. With Atira, they can bid on any inbound request - independent of complexity, language or region -with the same team, at better margins and with optimized configurations.
And because Atira is the first system to process everything that comes into and goes out of a manufacturer's commercial organization, every deal compounds into a proprietary knowledge layer: which configurations win at which margins, which red flags cost money, and recommendations of what the most senior engineers would say. It turns that accumulated expertise into a digital competitive advantage, and provides the foundation for what comes next: pricing intelligence, supplier coordination and, ultimately, a single commercial operating system informing sales, procurement and R&D.
Unique Customer Love
Since launching less than a year ago, Atira has signed more than a dozen clients, from mid-market leaders like Robel, Theegarten-Pactec and Fette Compacting to global enterprises with more than €1 billion in revenue. ABB E-Mobility has deployed the platform globally; Chiron Group is expanding from Germany into the US; a large plant engineering group uses Atira on projects worth hundreds of millions of euros; and Rema Tip Top runs Atira across its sales teams in Australia, Brazil and Chile.
Remarkably, every one of these customers was closed founder-led, with zero commercial headcount, largely through customers referring Atira to their own partners and suppliers.
Marrying Technical and Industrial Workflow Expertise
Atira's co-founders are Florian Diegruber, who led some of Palantir's largest industrial accounts in the DACH region and August DuMont Schütte, formerly a software engineer at Google, where he shipped LLM systems serving hundreds of millions of queries a day. Around them, they have assembled a talent-dense roster of industrial experts and forward-deployed engineers.
Today, we announced we're leading Atira's seed round. Soon, AI agents will operate on both sides of every complex B2B transaction, and the systems that coordinate them will be as fundamental to industry as ERP became a generation ago. We believe Atira is positioned to be that system, built from Munich, for the world. Welcome to the Accel family, Atira!
