1 week Ago
Two university students have secured £250,000 for their AI bid-writing start-up. Samuel Aaron, 22 and Jamie Horsnell, 21, both students at the University of Southampton, launched their business, mytender.io, in September 2023.
The venture, built on artificial intelligence, aims to revolutionise the tendering process in the construction and facilities management sectors. The substantial investment from Fuel Ventures marks the highest sum ever invested in a start-up founded by undergraduates at the university. READ MORE: Southampton Solent University students win RTS Southern Award University of Southampton duo land record investment for student venture (Image: University of Southampton) Jamie said: "The investment will allow us to rapidly scale up our sales and marketing activity and further develop our agentic AI system.
"It allows Sam and I to keep living the dream of building a massive business together out of university and aid our goals for mytender.io to become one of the biggest pieces of bid writing software in the world." The fledgling company already boasts more than 20 clients and a small team of employees.
The pair have big plans to grow the start-up once they graduate this year. Jamie explained how the idea was born: "We were housemates and we were always talking about different ideas as we were keen to start a business together. "We went to a small business speed launch weekend organised by the university’s student enterprise team.
"We learnt lots that weekend and it gave us a real urge to create a business." The duo initially set up an AI consultancy and reached out to hundreds of businesses offering AI automation. Samuel said: "Through reaching out via lots of emails, we met a facilities management director who was spending his weekends writing bids and responding to tenders and wanted to use AI to speed this up.
"At that time, we didn’t know what bids or tenders were, but we did lots of research and things grew from there." Mark Pearson, managing partner at Fuel Ventures, said: "Samuel and Jamie have demonstrated impressive ambition and innovation with mytender.io.
"Their unique approach to automating bid writing with AI has the potential to significantly disrupt the industry.".
