Today’s startup wants to lighten the load for mid-sized businesses competing against huge corporations for big-money contracts.

Scroll down to read all about BidScript.

Coincidentally, BidScript was yesterday announced as one of 12 startups participating in the first run of Praetura Ventures’ Praeseed programme. Previous PreSeed Now startup North AI is also on the list.

– Martin

BidScript is building an easier way to bid for big-money contracts

If you’ve ever written a bid for a tender or contract, you’ll know how soul-crushingly boring and time consuming it can be. 

Even businesses with dedicated bid-writing teams can spend days or weeks pulling together a strong proposition that could be worth a huge amount of money.

BidScript is a startup that wants to lighten the load. Co-founder Henry Brogan describes the startup’s product as “tender automation software”, designed to complete the slew of documents a typical bid will require. 

This not only shortens the time it takes to complete an application but allows the company to submit more bids for more work without needing to hire additional staff.

Brogan and his fellow co-founder Tyler McCarthy spotted the opportunity while doing process automation consultancy for a mechanical engineering company.

“After auditing their processes and systems, we discovered a pretty big problem in how they completed tender contracts and the time it took to complete them. So that's when BidScript was born,” says Brogan.

How it works

BidScript’s web-based interface allows users to upload all the documents they need to complete. 

In the demo Brogan and McCarthy gave me, they uploaded a pre-qualification questionnaire. The software automatically filled it in with company information, answering free-text questions, ticking and crossing in boxes as required, answering “n/a” to irrelevant questions, and the like.

If the software isn’t confident enough of filling in a correct answer, it will leave that field bank. Users can fill them in manually and also feed BidScript with the data it needs to complete those fields correctly in the future.

“If we can't produce good answers, then contracts aren't going to be won. So answer accuracy is massively important to us,” says Brogan.

As is increasingly common for B2B software, BidScript offers a chatbot. In this case, it allows users to query company data to help them fill in any fields the software wasn’t able to.

BidScript requires a lot of company information to work, so it supports uploads in a variety of file formats. It also stores completed bids for future reference. Support for uploading supporting files for a bid is on the roadmap too, along with CRM support to help businesses track progress towards a deal with a particular customer.

“The platform's ready to go out into businesses, but we've still got a lot of room to go in our eyes, and we'll build features to make it more end-to-end and more efficient. And we'll gain that feedback through the feedback loop we'll go through with early adopters,” says Brogan.

The startup has put together a short video overview of the product as it stands:

The story so far

Brogan and McCarthy are both university students who have known each other since school. They say their journey into entrepreneurship together felt inevitable, it was just a case of finding the right business idea. 

Before beginning his degree, McCarthy spent a year working in financial services in Abu Dhabi. McCarthy, meanwhile, has coupled his computer science degree with a data science internship at BMW Group. This has involved using a Boston Dynamics robot dog to collect data for a digital twin, and monitor maintenance of a factory.

Brogan says they’re currently onboarding their first user, with two more early adopters lined up to onboard soon. They aim to have six companies using the platform by the start of July.

These first users are getting free access to the product for the time being to help BidScript validate their approach and further refine the product.

Meanwhile, the startup has just been announced as part of Praetura Ventures’ first cohort for its Praeseed programme. You can find out more about that in our recent interview with Jess Jackson.

Subscribe to Premium Membership to read the rest.