Volve raises USD 3 million (NOK 30 million) to build commercial decision intelligence for construction

Volve today announces a seed round of USD 3 million (NOK 30 million) to expand its platform for construction tendering across Europe and to develop the connected data structure that sits underneath it.

The round is led by Skyfall Ventures, with participation from J12, Norrsken Evolve, OBOS Ventures, Antler and StartupLab. Daniel Kjørberg Siraj, former CEO of OBOS, joins as an angel investor.

When a contractor bids on a tender, the team has short deadlines to work through dense sets of contracts, drawings, requirements and specifications, and then commit the company to a bid. What they miss becomes their risk, and often their cost. Volve reads the full documentation, maps how requirements, scope and risk connect, and supports the team through the tender process. It helps them decide whether to bid, at what price, and which risks to carry - and it helps them win: sharper bids against the criteria the client scores, and better control of the offers coming from subcontractors.

The funding will deepen the product for contractors and public clients, take the platform into more European markets, and build out the connected data structure beneath it. Every construction project is different, but the underlying commercial decisions repeat. That structure means the knowledge built up on one project can be reused on the next, rather than each tender starting from scratch - and teams working in different countries can draw on the same foundation.

Volve has been used on more than 2,500 construction projects with leading contractors across the Nordics. On one recent public infrastructure tender comprising 213 documents, Volve surfaced 20 risk findings and supported the comparison of 73 subcontractor bids. The company is now scaling into the UK and continental Europe.

Construction is a project business: you have to win projects to stay in business, but winning on the wrong terms is worse than losing. Volve is built inside the decisions where that gets decided, and that is the category we are defining.
Herman B. Smith, co-founder and CEO

Why the tender phase

Around 80 percent of project cost is locked in before the contract is signed, and the decisions made in that first stage set everything that follows. This happens in an industry representing more than EUR 1.6 trillion in annual investment across Europe and accounting for nearly one in five public tender notices. Yet it is the phase where digitisation has advanced least.

Volve's ambition is to become the intelligence layer for commercial decisions in tendering and preconstruction across Europe. The round strengthens its position in the Nordics and puts the company on the ground in more markets, with hiring under way across commercial and engineering roles.

What our investors say

Volve is purpose-built for construction tendering, turning accumulated project knowledge into an asset rather than an archive. We are excited to join the journey.
Espen Malmo, Managing Partner, Skyfall Ventures

The Volve team combines deep domain expertise with exceptional technical execution.
Emmet King, Founding Partner, J12

Volve has proven the model with the most demanding contractors in the Nordics and is now taking it across Europe. We are excited to back a company this well placed to lead the category.
Johan Attby, General Partner, Norrsken Evolve

What the team has delivered made the decision to back them again an easy one.
Henning Lunde, Head of OBOS Ventures

The pace from first idea to a platform used by the Nordics' leading contractors, now expanding across Europe, is rare.
Anna Munthe-Kaas, Partner, Antler