[Wow Tale] CLIWANT Secures Pre-Series A Funding

Korean startup CLIWANT, which analyzes bid proposals (RFPs) using AI and data, has secured Pre-Series A funding just nine months after its incorporation. This round of investment was jointly led by BonAngels Venture Partners, who participated in the seed round, and new investor Blue Corner. CLIWANT provides a service that allows users to comprehensively view all public institution bid announcements in one place, based on the largest real-time bid data from the Public Procurement Service’s Nara Market, as well as from government agencies, universities, hospitals, banks, and more.

CLIWANT’s core function is to quickly and accurately match companies with suitable bid announcements by analyzing 10 years’ worth of RFP and bid data for similarities. Additionally, it uses AI to automatically identify risk clauses that could be disadvantageous to a company, calculate bid prices, and offer advanced features for systematic bid strategy formulation, such as government budget and past project analysis.

Currently, CLIWANT has over 50 clients ranging from large corporations to startups, spanning various fields such as SI, education, ESG , consulting, telecommunications, and MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions). As the private economy faces challenges, more companies are recognizing the attractiveness of public projects and are using CLIWANT to venture into public bidding. For instance, one large corporate client significantly reduced costs associated with competitor and budget analysis during their annual business planning and saved resources on manually analyzing RFPs and searching for bid announcements through AI automation.

CLIWANT actively supports more companies in successfully securing contracts by lowering the barriers to entry in the procurement market. This enables companies to secure stable revenue streams and references through public projects. With more competitive companies participating in the bidding market, public projects funded by taxpayers are expected to be utilized more efficiently.

In the third quarter of this year, CLIWANT plans to launch new features, such as bid document simplification, which will help streamline practical tasks and expand sales. This aims to reduce repetitive paperwork from two weeks to ten minutes, allowing companies to focus more on important planning tasks.

The Korean procurement market is a massive industry worth approximately 200 trillion KRW($153.8 billion USD). The markets in the US (900 trillion KRW; $692.3 billion USD), Japan (790 trillion KRW;$607.7 billion USD), China (3,800 trillion KRW;$2.9 trillion USD), and Singapore (80 trillion KRW;$61.5 billion USD) are also significant, and the differences in bidding systems among countries are minimal, indicating immense growth potential in the global market. In particular, Singapore requires a thorough understanding of public bidding since most projects are government-led.

Given that CLIWANT leverages the latest LLM technology and big data analysis, it currently has no clear competitors worldwide. This recognition led OpenAI to award CLIWANT the Most AGI Potential Award in March this year.

CLIWANT’s CEO, Joonho Cho, a 14-year veteran global bidding expert with experience in Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea, stated, “The bidding market was a typically neglected and outdated market, but CLIWANT’s potential has been acknowledged through this investment. In the third quarter of this year, we plan to expand into the Singapore and US markets, rapidly capturing the global market and advancing our solutions.”

*Media Source: https://en.wowtale.net/2024/08/01/226165/?utm_content=bufferfe757&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer