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Tees Valley tech business, OPPORTUNI has landed a £1 million seed investment to support its tender-as-a-service platform.
The funding from Fuel Ventures will allow the forward-thinking scale-up to fast-track towards its aspirations of helping more small and medium sized businesses to identify and win big contracts within the public sector.
Connecting the dots between portals and writing bids, OPPORTUNI simplifies the complete public sector tender process for businesses.
Since launching in March 2020, just 10 days before the first UK lockdown, the tech start-up has experienced substantial growth, with the help of Teesside University-led initiative, DigitalCity.
Helping from the outset to source and scope relevant tenders using smart matching algorithms, OPPORTUNI supports SMEs every step of the way to uncover relevant and winnable contracts.
OPPORTUNI’S on-demand procurement support links organisations to suitable contract opportunities, and via their global network of experienced professional bid writers, public sector procurement has never been more accessible for small to medium sized businesses across the UK and globally.
The innovative OPPORTUNI platform has already helped customers seal multi-million-pound deals with councils, NHS trusts and Government departments nationwide.
Proving popular from the get-go, the business had paying customers on board within a matter of months and is now helping big-name brands including AECOM, SSE and Communicate Plc as well as thousands of small businesses.
Emily Bentley, Marketing and Business Development Manager at Communicate Plc said: “When introduced to the concept, we knew that OPPORTUNI had the solution we’d been looking for since tendering began.
We’ve watched OPPORTUNI grow from concept to operational and it has been a revelation for the way we search for opportunities, as those relevant now come directly to us.
The team are friendly and personable, and understand our requirements. As well as the team, OPPORTUNI has its own machine learning and AI smart algorithms, like a helping hand in itself so we know, as we continue to work with them, that what it brings to us will be the perfect, tailored opportunities.”
The platforms potential has been recognised nationally, with Tech Nation crowning OPPORTUNI as one of its Rising Stars in the North East, resulting to several offers from venture capital investors globally.
The company’s accelerated success has also led to the creation of several new job opportunities. There are exciting expansion plans to employ 45 new members by the end of the year, adding to the existing team of staff that are working across the globe in the UK, Malta, Amsterdam, Canada and more. Co-founder, Tim Ward from Hartlepool, said: “When starting out we knew our solution had a lot of potential, but we didn’t know how to achieve that potential.
The DigitalCity Accelerator Programme helped us to gain feedback and guidance as we made key decisions and started scaling the business. I am always keen to learn from others and this was a great way of getting advice and guidance in a structured, consistent way.”
With this type of success in such a short space of time, OPPORTUNI is on track to become the first billion-dollar business in the Tees Valley and has exciting international growth plans for the next 18 months.
To follow the business growth journey and find out more, please visit: https://opportuni.co.uk/
