Forgent AI, an AI company reinventing how businesses win public sector contracts, today announced it has raised €4.3 million in Pre-Seed funding.
Public procurement represents a €2 trillion market in Europe, yet tens of billions are lost annually to manual processes, fragmented tender portals, and outdated workflows. Despite the massive stakes, 40 per cent of tenders receive one or zero bids, resulting in reduced competition, inflated prices, and lost public value.
These inefficiencies come at a critical moment. Germany's €600 billion defence and infrastructure funds and the EU's €800 billion recovery package are reaching peak deployment, yet most companies can't navigate the complexity to bid. The result: fewer options for governments and missed opportunities for business across Europe.
Forgent is changing that. Its platform uses AI agents to compress work from days to hours, enabling companies to discover more relevant opportunities, draft stronger bids, streamline compliance checks, and significantly cut costs - freeing up teams to focus on strategy and execution, not paperwork.
The average tender has several hundred requirements and upwards of 30 different documents, and one small error can disqualify the entire application. Forgent’s AI understands all formal requirements and uses precision to scan and screen the best opportunities and recommend a bidding decision nearly instantaneously, saving significant time and resources.
Forgent was founded by a team of engineers, researchers, and operators with deep industry expertise who are on a mission to build highly reliable, domain-aware AI for high-stakes environments. The founding team includes:
Erik Heinelt: Serial entrepreneur with two exits, including a local services marketplace to CHECK24, and co-founder of the German Startup Association.
Dr Leonard Wossnig: Google PhD fellow and honorary Research Fellow at UCL with over 10 years in AI research, founded and sold AI startup Rahko, and was a former CTO at LabGenius, and
Dr Timo Kuschma: Stanford-trained physician-scientist with a track record of leading AI teams at QuantumBlack that unlocked hundreds of millions in value, and leadership roles at Tecton (acquired by Databricks ), and Humanloop (exit to Anthropic).
“We see a generational opportunity to rebuild how businesses engage with governments: faster, smarter, and at scale," said Erik Heinelt, co-founder and CEO of Forgent.
"When we succeed, public institutions gain access to better solutions, economic participation expands, and innovation flows more freely into the systems that shape everyday life.”
Already, Forgent’s customers, ranging from infrastructure firms to high-tech suppliers, are using the platform to simplify discovery and identify precise matches across thousands of fragmented tender portals in Europe and improve win rates with proposals that never miss a requirement.
Cherry Ventures led the round, with participation from prominent angels, including Charlie Songhurst (Board at Meta), KatrinSuder, (Chair at DHL Group, Board at Cloudflare) and leading experts of OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind.
“What excites us about Forgent is not just the technology, it’s the ambition,” said Filip Dames, Founding Partner at Cherry Ventures.
“They’re not building another tool. They’re rearchitecting how a €2 trillion public market works.
By bridging deep AI expertise with hard-won procurement experience, this team is unlocking real economic value for both businesses and taxpayers.”
The new funding will be used to grow the team, expand into new verticals, and advance Forgent’s AI agent technology.
Lead image: Forgent AI. Photo: uncredited.
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