A fledgling business set up by two University of Southampton students that brings AI to the world of tendering has attracted a quarter-of-a-million pounds in investment. 

It is the highest sum invested in a start-up founded by undergraduates at the university to date. Business student Samuel Aaron, 22, and Economics student Jamie Horsnell, 21, established their start-up – called mytender.io – in September 2023. 

mytender.io is an AI-driven bid writing platform that transforms tendering processes in the construction and facilities management industries. The £250,000 investment from Fuel Ventures will enable Jamie and Sam to take their start-up to the next level. 

Jamie said: “The investment will allow us to rapidly scale up our sales and marketing activity, and further develop our 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 duo already has over 20 clients, a small team of employees, and big ambitions to grow the start-up when they graduate this year.

“We were housemates, and we were always talking about different ideas as we were keen to start a business together,” said Jamie. “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.”

They set up an AI consultancy and contacted hundreds of businesses offering AI automation. 

“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,” explained Samuel. “At that time, we didn’t know what bids or tenders were, but we did lots of research and things grew from there.”

He added: “Outside of our studies, we put everything else that we can to the business. After we graduate, we both intend to work on this full time.” 

They have employed two interns, a salesperson and one full time employee, and are looking to grow the start-up via seed funding in the coming months. They are also keen to explore overseas expansion. 

Last month, Universities UK launched a new campaign to highlight the impact of university start-ups. 

Since 2014, 38,000 student and staff start-up companies have been launched with the support of universities, and from 2014-15 to 2022-23 there was a 70 per cent increase in active firms. On average, more than 4,300 start-ups are registered each year, and in the academic year 2022 to 2023, more than 64,000 people were employed by start-ups that emerged from universities. 

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