Cube RM, an AI revenue management software, has raised over $8M in a Series A led by Runa Capital, a global VC firm focusing on deep tech early-stage investments, joined by the Greek Marathon VC.
Тhe Greek-founded startup’s goal is to simplify processes for global pharmaceutical and medical equipment companies.
“While working with global life sciences customers, we discovered that 25% to 60% of their revenues come from public sector tenders,” George Boretos, the co-founder of Cube RM, shares with The Recursive.
The public procurement market is valued at over €12T worldwide, but there isn’t a dedicated enterprise software that allows discovery and facilitates deal flows at a global scale. In Europe, the market has grown 10% each year between 2016-2018 and was valued at over €800B annual value of tenders.
Cube RM is working on bringing transparency in public tendering processes both for governments and public organizations. The solution is built on the Salesforce platform and according to the founders, it is the only global tender management solution in the Salesforce AppExchange.
By using a combination of statistics and economic theory, the AI management tool automatizes online searches for tenders, facilitates bid preparation, while also keeping track of the winners. The MA engine allows customers to evaluate and predict the probability of winning the tender and offers intuitive bidding prices with limited data points for the competitors, both past and present. The revenue management and optimization SaaS Suite also keeps the information about the market structured to improve sales rates.
“Now is the perfect time for tender automation in the life science industry. On one hand, the pandemic boosted budgets and the overall importance of this industry, and on the other hand, it highlighted the ubiquitous lack of digitalization and abundance of inefficient bureaucratic processes at large enterprises,” says Konstantin Vinogradov, Partner at Runa Capital.
How to facilitate and automate the pricing decisions
Cube RM was founded in 2017 by Costas Economopoulos, George Boretos, and Philip Kytinos and they all share a background in enterprise software. Previously, Costas Economopoulos, who is also the Co-CEO of Cube RM, founded B2B software companies focused on Life Sciences, Manufacturing, and Media industries.
George Boretos, the co-CEO and CMO of the AI startup, has over two decades of experience in the business software industry, with a focus on pricing optimization models. Philip Kytinos, the CTO, has built various enterprise software solutions in the last decade.
“We started by working on collecting tender data from multiple countries around Europe and applying NLP to make sense out of the data, which is usually very bad quality. Then we expanded to more countries around the world and also created the functionalities to support the tender management and bidding processes. Finally, we deployed our Machine Learning predictive guidance algorithms to facilitate and automate the pricing decisions,” Economopoulos explains.
He says that in the next two years they want to create the largest public procurement information warehouse in the world. To do this, they plan to extend their NLP algorithms to extract information in multiple languages and develop AI/ML algorithms to automate pricing decisions and tender bidding processes that can save time.
The investment will be used to scale the solution globally, targeting industries like Manufacturing, Chemicals, and Hi-Tech. Boretos adds that this funding round will bring them closer to becoming a leading tender management software vendor globally with a focus on innovation and rapid commercial expansion. The team will keep its headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland, and the engineering center in Athens, Greece.
Boston Scientific ($BSX), Takeda ($TYO), Kemira ($KEMIRA), and Bavarian Nordic ($BAVA) are currently using Cube RM to automate their tendering process.
