Manchester's BidScript raises €701K pre-Seed to help companies win more public contracts

BidScript, a Manchester-based AI startup, has raised €701,000 in pre-Seed funding, bringing its total raised at the pre-Seed stage past $1 million. NPIF II – PXN Equity Finance, managed by PXN Ventures as part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II, continued its backing from an earlier tranche; SFC Capital joined as a new investor. The company was founded in 2023 by Henry Brogan and Tyler McCarthy — childhood friends who started BidScript while at university — and is targeting one of the most persistently inefficient processes in business: finding and winning public contracts.

Tendering is broken for most companies

The opportunity BidScript is built on is structural. Government and corporate procurement is enormous — public sector contracts alone account for around 15% of GDP in OECD economies — yet the bid-writing process remains a manual, labour-intensive undertaking that most smaller companies skip entirely. Parsing a tender document to understand requirements, tracking compliance across multiple criteria, drafting a competitive response and submitting within deadline is the kind of work that typically requires a dedicated team or an expensive specialist. The result is a market where incumbents with bidding capability consistently outcompete smaller suppliers who could deliver the work but lack the bandwidth to compete for it.

BidScript's platform automates the workflow: it locates relevant opportunities, parses requirements, drafts bid responses and manages the submission process. The company says customers see win rates up to 50% higher than before using the platform — a claim significant enough to drive early international traction in the UK, US and Middle East before the company has left the pre-Seed stage.

From Manchester to a global workflow

The new capital goes to growing the team, pushing product development, and expanding the customer base in the UK and internationally. The investor structure reflects both the company's Northern England roots — the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund is a government-backed vehicle designed to back high-growth businesses in the region — and a wider institutional vote from SFC Capital, which operates nationally.

Co-Founder and CEO Henry Brogan is direct: "We are delighted to have secured the continued backing from PXN and welcome new investment from SFC Capital." The self-assurance of that statement is appropriate for a company that has built a cross-market user base on less than a million dollars. How far the win-rate claim holds as the platform scales — and whether AI bid-writing generalises reliably across procurement categories — is what the new capital is intended to find out.