Bid King is designed to transform how organisations respond to RFIs (requests for information), tenders and complex proposals.

With a knowledge centre that learns about the business, its services, tone of voice and accreditations – and enhances each submission based on past wins – the product saves up to 75% of time, allowing colleagues to produce three times more bids.

Featuring a live dashboard to track bid performance and success rates, the goal is to simplify, improve and scale up users' bid efforts without having to increase headcount. It fuels smarter collaboration between multiple subject matter experts in larger businesses, ensures compliance with stringent framework criteria, and accelerates the completion of bids for resource-constrained firms – arguably levelling the playing field for SMEs.

Enabling organisations to respond to both public and private sector bids, the platform has been beta tested among a range of businesses across the construction, technology, medical, charitable and business services sectors, to name just a few.

Built from decades of first-hand frustration

Bid King is the brainchild of Invent Group – a technology firm headquartered in Durham – which strives to deliver AI-native infrastructure that solves real-world business challenges.

CEO and co-founder Malcolm Brechin has more than 25 years' experience building and scaling businesses, having held a number of C-suite positions spanning sales directorships and go to market strategies, for SMEs through to investment-backed enterprises. In fact, it was decades of first-hand frustration that eventually led to the development of Bid King, with CTO and business partner Sam Whisker.

"I'd have given my right arm for Bid King throughout my career. I've worked with driven sales teams battling to create the best bids, as quickly as possible, and with the highest possible chance of conversion, to secure new business and meet seemingly impossible targets.

"But this is often such an admin-intensive process, where you're racing against the clock to find information located in multiple different places, copying and pasting the detail you think matters the most, formatting it to suit the requirements of a specific tender, and ensuring all stakeholders have made their valid contributions, so the finished bid looks and sounds the part. This process requires a significant investment of time and money with no guarantee of success, so we set out to change that."

— Malcolm Brechin, CEO and co-founder

Combatting 'shadow AI' in the workplace

Bid King also combats the use of 'shadow AI' within the workplace – the forbidden use of unauthorised open source LLMs (Large Language Models) such as ChatGPT.

"The UK population is using AI more and more, but that means we're seeing the unsanctioned use of tools such as ChatGPT within the workplace too. We understand why – AI speeds up everything! But if sales colleagues are asking confidential questions about commercially sensitive information, you lose control as a business.

"We've built Bid King using secure retrieval augmented generation (RAG) so organisations have a resilient environment to create their tenders and proposals, benefitting from the efficiency and learning advantages of AI but with the guardrails needed to protect them at every stage."

— Sam Whisker, CTO and co-founder

What comes next

With users onboarded in as little as seven days, Bid King aims to secure 50 clients over the next 12 months, and is targeting £500,000 revenue by the end of 2027.