Forgent secures 4.3 million euros pre-seed

The Berlin-based startup Forgent has raised 4.3 million euros in a pre-seed financing round. The round is led by Cherry Ventures and includes prominent angel investors such as Charlie Songhurst (Board Meta), Katrin Suder (Chair DHL Group, Board Cloudflare) and experts from OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind.

Forgent develops AI agents that help companies to efficiently process public tenders, find suitable contracts and submit successful bids. The aim is to make the European public procurement market, which is worth around 2 trillion euros, more accessible and competitive.

Huge market with major efficiency problems

Although the public sector has a market volume of 2 trillion euros, tens of billions of euros are lost every year due to manual processes, fragmented tender portals and outdated workflows. Almost 40% of all tenders receive only one bid or none at all, resulting in less competition, higher prices and reduced public value.

Most recently, Germany's €600 billion defense and infrastructure fund and the EU's €800 billion recovery package are at the heart of funding allocation. Many companies are unable to handle the complex tendering processes efficiently.

AI agents speed up and improve the tendering process

Forgent uses AI agents that compress work steps from days to hours. Companies can:

• Discover suitable tenders faster,
• prepare tenders efficiently,
• check compliance requirements automatically,
• significantly reduce costs.

A tendering process often comprises hundreds of requirements and over 30 documents. Even a small error can lead to exclusion. Forgent's AI checks these precisely, recommends a bidding decision almost immediately and thus saves considerable time and personnel costs.

Customers, team and expertise

Forgent is already used by infrastructure and high-tech companies to efficiently identify tenders across Europe and increase their chances of winning.

The founding team has in-depth experience in AI, startups and public procurement:

• Erik Heinelt, serial entrepreneur, two exits, co-founder of the German Startups Association
• Dr. Leonard Wossnig, Google PhD Fellow, AI startup Rahko, former CTO LabGenius
• Dr. Timo Kuschma, Stanford-trained, led AI teams at QuantumBlack, Tecton and Humanloop

Use of the new resources

The new funds will be used to strengthen the Forgent team, further develop the AI agent technology and drive expansion into additional industries. In this way, the company aims to continuously improve its platform, increase efficiency in the processing of public tenders and support companies in winning contracts even faster and more reliably.

The European public procurement market offers enormous potential: more efficient processes increase the participation of companies, improve competition and increase public benefit. By automating tenders, thousands of hours of manual work can be saved and at the same time better quality tenders can be created. Forgent thus addresses a critical pain point for companies and administrations alike.