Helping infrastructure companies make faster and smarter bidding decisions: Why we invested in ContraVault AI
Transforming how infrastructure and engineering enterprises evaluate and win complex projects
Mandeep Julka, Kinshuk Soperna
Bengaluru, June 2026
Infrastructure projects across the world are still won through one of the least automated workflows in enterprise software: the tendering process.
Large enterprises across infrastructure, energy, engineering and industrial services evaluate 100-1000 tenders every year, representing billions of dollars of potential revenue. A single bid can involve tens of stakeholders, hundreds to thousands of pages of documentation, and weeks or even months of cross-functional evaluation.
The number of tenders bid for is limited by the organization’s evaluation capacity, which therefore directly limits its business growth. Tenders are not merely documents to be reviewed; they are the starting point for revenue generation and commercial strategy. A single successful bid can lead to a multi-year, high-value project running into millions or even billions of dollars.
Yet, the workflows around assessing the tender documents remain manual, fragmented and heavily dependent on institutional knowledge scattered across teams, old project files and individual experiences.
Over the past year, AI has made it dramatically easier to process and summarise long documents. But in high-stakes tendering, summarisation alone is not enough. The real value lies in helping teams prioritize opportunities basis fast and correct identification of capabilities and risks, while overlaying learnings from organization-wide decades of historical experiences.
In other words, the opportunity is much larger than documenting intelligence – it is in building an operating layer for transforming bid preparation.
This is where ContraVault stood out to us.
Building the intelligence layer for successful bids
ContraVault is building a procurement intelligence platform for tender and RFP workflows, starting with evaluation and expanding into the broader pre-bid operating layer. Its product helps business development, commercial, legal, finance and technical teams convert long, inconsistent and often weakly structured tender documents into organised, auditable and decision-ready outputs.
More importantly, the platform combines domain expertise, organisational context and workflow intelligence to deliver actionable insights directly within existing enterprise processes. Instead of simply helping companies read documents faster, it helps them make better decisions, faster.
This problem is not unique to India. Tender-led project workflows operate in remarkably similar ways across the US, the Middle East and other developed markets, particularly in industries where projects are large and cross-functional. The documents may differ by geography, but the underlying challenge remains the same: evaluating high-value opportunities quickly and accurately while accounting for commercial, technical and contractual risks. This creates a large and globally relevant market for specialised software that can augment decision-making in complex project environments.
A context-aware global product with compounding value
What makes ContraVault particularly interesting is how personalized to each organization the product becomes over time. In these enterprises, some of the most valuable knowledge sits outside formal systems – in past bids, old project files, internal guidelines and the experience of long-tenured employees.
ContraVault brings this institutional knowledge into the workflow. Every new tender can therefore be evaluated not only against the document at hand but also against the organisation’s own history, risk appetite and operating context. As more workflows, users and historical information move onto the platform, the product becomes increasingly valuable to its customers and increasingly difficult to replicate with general-purpose AI tools. ContraVault has helped clients analyse $2.6B+ of tenders, reducing the time spent in procuring tenders by 60-70% while increasing the total number of bids placed by 30-35%.
We are also excited by the company’s expansion path. The initial wedge is tender evaluation, but the platform is already moving deeper into the pre-bid workflow and engaging with multiple participants across the tender ecosystem. Early customer adoption has been a strong signal, with ContraVault gaining traction among large enterprises in traditionally slow-moving sectors, driven by clear operational pain points rather than experimental AI budgets.
The team building a deeply embedded and sticky product
The nature of these customers suggests that once embedded, the product can become deeply ingrained in everyday workflows as it captures more users, more processes and more institutional knowledge.
Finally, Sayan, Isha and Tanmay, the co-founders, bring together a rare combination of product intuition, customer empathy, go-to-market execution and technical depth. They have demonstrated an ability to translate messy, high-stakes enterprise workflows into software that customers trust and adopt.
At Chiratae, we believe vertical AI will create enduring companies in sectors where workflows are complex, data is unstructured and decisions are business critical. ContraVault sits squarely at that intersection, and we are excited to partner with the team as they build the intelligence layer for tenders, bids and project-driven enterprise workflows.