Construction companies can spend weeks deciding whether a project is worth pursuing, how aggressively to price a bid and which contractual risks they are willing to accept. Norwegian construction technology company Volve is aiming to make those decisions faster and more informed, raising $3 million, equivalent to NOK 30 million, in seed funding to develop its intelligence platform and accelerate expansion across Europe.
Backing for Construction Intelligence
The funding round was led by Skyfall Ventures, with participation from J12, Norrsken Evolve, OBOS Ventures, Antler and StartupLab. Several angel investors also joined the round, including Daniel Kjørberg Siraj, former CEO of Nordic housing and urban development company OBOS.
Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Oslo, Volve was established by Herman Smith, Abyl Ikshanov and Alf Jørgen Dovland. The company is focused on one of the most commercially important stages of construction: everything that happens before a project actually begins.
Its platform is designed for contractors and public sector organisations involved in tendering and preconstruction, helping them evaluate opportunities, prepare bids and identify risks before contracts are signed.
Turning Thousands of Pages Into Decisions
Construction tender teams routinely have to make major commercial decisions under significant time pressure. A single project can involve contracts, drawings, technical specifications, requirements and other documents containing information that is often interconnected.
Volve’s platform analyses this documentation and maps relationships between project requirements, scope and potential risks. This gives commercial teams a structured overview of information that would otherwise have to be manually reviewed and connected.
The technology can also help contractors align their bids with client evaluation criteria and assess offers submitted by subcontractors.
Volve argues that this stage of a project has an outsized impact on profitability. According to the company, approximately 80 per cent of a project’s cost is determined before a contract is signed, making decisions made during tendering and preconstruction critical to eventual margins.
Winning the Right Projects
For construction companies, winning more contracts is not necessarily enough. A project secured at the wrong price or under unfavourable terms can create significant financial and operational problems.
“Construction is a project business: you have to win projects to stay in business, but winning on the wrong terms is worse than losing,” said Herman Smith, co founder and CEO of Volve.
He said project margins are often shaped by commercial decisions made before construction starts, with teams having to process thousands of interconnected documents within tight deadlines.
Volve is targeting this decision making gap by providing an intelligence layer that helps teams understand the commercial implications of a project before committing resources to it.
Building Institutional Knowledge
The company is also introducing a graph based structure designed to connect knowledge across different construction projects.
Although every construction project has its own specifications, many of the commercial questions and decisions involved in tendering are repeated. Volve’s new approach is intended to allow insights generated during one tender to inform future bids.
This could reduce the need for teams to repeatedly start from scratch and help organisations build a more persistent knowledge base from their previous projects.
Expanding Across Europe
Volve is already being used by main contractors and public clients across the Nordic region and is expanding into the UK and Continental Europe.
The company sees significant potential in the European construction market, where construction represents more than €1.6 trillion in annual investment and construction contracts account for close to one in five public tenders.
The new funding will support further product development for main contractors and public sector clients while accelerating Volve’s European expansion. Its broader ambition is to become an intelligence platform for commercial decision making across the entire tendering and preconstruction process, helping construction businesses understand opportunities and risks before they commit to building.
