Stotles Secures Funding for Government Tender Transparency Platform

Government entities commonly announce potential business engagements through “tenders” to ensure openness with the citizenry. Nevertheless, this information is often dispersed, and larger organizations tend to possess greater access, allowing them to secure agreements even before the formal tender process begins. Recent scrutiny has focused on instances of U.K. government contracts being awarded to private consultants whose qualifications for the work have been called into question.

Transactions between the public and private sectors represent 14% of the world’s total GDP, and the European Commission estimates that even a 1% efficiency gain could result in annual savings of €20 billion for taxpayers.

Stotles is a recently established U.K.-based technology company that transforms disparate public sector information – including expenditure reports, tender notices, contractual agreements, meeting records, and press announcements – into a more comprehensive understanding of the marketplace, identifying crucial early indicators of forthcoming opportunities.

The company has secured £1.4 million in seed funding in a round spearheaded by Speedinvest, with additional investment from 7Percent Ventures, FJLabs, and prominent individual investors. These include Matt Robinson, a co-founder of GoCardless and current CEO of Nested; Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, COO at Go-Cardless; Charlie Songhurst, formerly Microsoft’s head of Corporate Strategy; Will Neale, the founder of Grabyo; and Akhil Paul. The company previously received funding from Seedcamp last year.

The founders of Stotles state that their prior experiences with public procurement processes, gained during their time at organizations such as Boston Consulting Group and the World Economic Forum, were highly unfavorable.

A private beta version of the platform has been available for nine months and is currently utilized by companies like UiPath, Freshworks, Rackspace, and Couchbase. Following this funding announcement, the company will launch an early access program.

Key competitors in the market include: Global Data, Contracts Advance, BIP Solutions, Spend Network/Open Opps, Tussel, and TenderLake. However, the majority of these competitors concentrate on monitoring published tenders or supplying contracting data for broad, periodic market analysis.