Southampton-founded technology startup mytender.io has secured a £1.4 million follow-on investment round and established a new office in Soho, London, to expand its commercial operations.

The funding round was led by early-stage venture capital firm Fuel Ventures, which previously backed the company with an initial £250,000 investment. The platform uses artificial intelligence to assist businesses in drafting and managing competitive tenders for public and private sector contracts.

mytender.io was established in 2023 by University of Southampton students Samuel Aaron and Jamie Horsnell alongside co-founders Joshua Aaron and Nicolas Dickreuter. The firm currently employs 13 staff members, with recent additions including senior account executive Ruby Kuzemko, AI engineer Dawar Farooq, and business development representative Danny Watson.

The business provides tender-writing automation tools to enterprise clients across facilities management, waste management, healthcare, and construction. Its client portfolio includes corporate contractors such as Suez, Churchill Group, Priory Group, and Samsic.

The capital expansion will be used to scale product development, expand sales operations, and grow its customer base to target more than 1,000 corporate users.

Samuel Aaron, co-founder and chief executive of mytender, said: “We’re growing the team and the office footprint so we can support more enterprise customers winning complex tenders and give businesses a real competitive advantage in work winning.”

In an earlier funding milestone establishing its early growth trajectory, mytender raised £250,000 in pre-seed funding from Fuel Ventures, marking the largest initial funding round secured by active University of Southampton students at the time. Early venture backing enabled the team to build and launch the core platform while still in higher education, giving the business commercial momentum to expand into high-value B2B sectors before seeking larger institutional equity.

Image source: mytender.io