🇳🇴 Volve raises $3 million seed round to expand AI-powered construction tendering platform

Oslo, Norway – August 25, 2026 – 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,” said Herman B. Smith, co-founder and CEO.

Why the tender phase

Around 80% 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,” said Espen Malmo, Managing Partner, Skyfall Ventures.

“The Volve team combines deep domain expertise with exceptional technical execution,” said 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,” said Johan Attby, General Partner, Norrsken Evolve.

“What the team has delivered made the decision to back them again an easy one,” said 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,” said Anna Munthe-Kaas, Partner, Antler.

“The team pairs real domain depth with the technical and commercial ability to execute,” said Iris Krigsvoll Auran, Investment Manager, Startuplab.

“Volve has built a tool that delivers concrete business value here and now,” said Daniel Kjørberg Siraj, Investor and former CEO of OBOS.

Media contact

Herman B. Smith
Co-Founder & CEO, Volve
LinkedIn: Herman B. Smith

For more information, visit Volve.

Originally published on August 25, 2026 by Volve.