The number of companies bidding on Dutch public tenders has been declining for years. That’s not because the contracts are unattractive — it’s because responding to a formal tender requires capacity that most smaller organisations don’t have. At Klapeen we’re building TenderJet to change that: a tender management platform that supports the complete process, from discovery to submission and evaluation.
What the current landscape covers — and what it doesn’t
Looking at the tools available today, a clear pattern emerges. TenderNed provides the official source data, structured primarily for the contracting authority rather than the bidder. A number of commercial tools do a good job of discovery: profile-based search and alerting when relevant tenders are published. And at the top of the market, bid management platforms exist for enterprise proposal teams, priced and designed accordingly.
What’s missing is an integrated solution for the phases where most of the actual work sits: qualifying whether a tender is worth pursuing, analysing hundreds of pages of requirements, writing a compliant response, managing question rounds, and learning from the outcome. For organisations under roughly 100 FTE, that work still happens in spreadsheets, shared folders, and documents assembled under deadline pressure.
Our approach
TenderJet is built around four principles:
The full process in one environment. Discovery, go/no-go qualification, requirement analysis, response writing, compliance checks, question rounds, and outcome tracking are connected steps in one workflow — not separate tools with manual handovers.
AI as an assistant, with verifiable output. The platform uses AI for summaries, requirement extraction, draft text, and quality checks. Every generated element carries a source reference, and a person reviews and decides. We consider this non-negotiable in a domain where an unsupported compliance claim can invalidate a bid.
A system that accumulates knowledge. Submitted responses feed a reusable content library; outcomes feed back into qualification. The organisation’s tender knowledge becomes an asset that persists beyond individual employees.
Development driven by users. We’re building TenderJet in close collaboration with a small group of launching customers who run live tenders through the platform during development and directly influence prioritisation.
The capacity question
The practical barrier to tender participation is well documented. A serious response to a formal tender takes tens to over a hundred hours of qualified work. Larger organisations absorb this with dedicated bid teams — typically two to three FTE, representing €150.000 to €250.000 in annual salary costs. For most SMEs that investment can’t be justified, which in practice means not bidding at all.
Our working hypothesis, confirmed so far by our launching customers, is that AI support across analysis, drafting, and compliance reduces the required capacity to the point where an existing employee can manage tender responses alongside their regular role. That changes the economics of participation: the cost per bid drops substantially, and the decision to pursue a tender becomes a commercial judgement rather than a staffing question. Since the platform reuses prior work, this effect compounds — each subsequent bid starts from an established content base rather than from a blank page.
Launching customer programme
Several companies have committed as launching customers. We’re looking for two to three more to complete the group; we’re deliberately keeping it small so that each participant has genuine influence on the roadmap and receives proper attention during onboarding.
Participation involves a named key user with a few hours per week during the development phase, at least one live tender run through the platform, and a reachable decision-maker for prioritisation questions. In return, launching customers receive founder terms — fixed pricing for 24 months, no setup costs — and a platform configured around their tender process from the start.
Interested?
If your organisation responds to Dutch public or private tenders, or has so far decided against participating because of the capacity it requires, we’d like to hear from you.