Submira is Innopulse’s platform for Swiss public procurement. The premise is simple: do not just find public contracts, win them. Between a publication on simap.ch and a submitted, competitive bid sit days of manual work for most suppliers — searching, reading, matching criteria, writing, checking formalities. Submira covers that whole path as one continuous process rather than automating a single slice of it. The product is in beta and is being extended continuously.
The market in question
Swiss public bodies procure on the order of CHF 41 billion a year — federal government, cantons, municipalities, hospitals, universities, transport operators and utilities combined. A substantial share of those contracts goes to small and medium-sized firms. Access is formally open: every tender above the threshold is published, and any qualified company may bid. In practice access is unevenly distributed, because it presupposes capacity. A firm with its own bid team finds the right tenders early and writes bids calmly. A firm without one — which describes most Swiss SMEs — misses deadlines, overlooks exclusion criteria, or does not bid at all. That capacity gap is what Submira addresses.
Connected directly to simap.ch
Submira draws tender data through official, cleared access to the simap.ch API. That is a material difference from tools that scrape published pages: the data arrives structured, complete and without delay. The platform shows current publications with the awarding body, canton, procedure type and contract type. For any actual bid, the awarding body’s official documents remain authoritative — Submira is the working layer above them, not a substitute for the publication.
Search that understands rather than filters
Plain keyword search fails reliably in public procurement, because awarding bodies name the same work differently. An IT provider searching for "software development" misses the tender for an "application maintenance mandate". Submira therefore uses semantic matching against search profiles: the company describes what it does, and the platform surfaces what fits — even where the wording diverges. Alerts run automatically, which removes the daily manual check of simap.ch.
AI analysis with a source reference on every finding
Tender documents routinely run to several hundred pages and scatter the decisive information across the specification, the evidence requirements, the scoring matrix and the draft contract. Submira ingests those documents and extracts the requirements, deadlines, suitability criteria and — most importantly — the knock-out criteria. Every extraction carries a reference back to where it was found. That source reference is where useful AI separates from useless AI in this field: a summary without evidence forces a full re-read and therefore saves nothing, whereas a finding with a page reference can be verified in seconds.
Bids built from the firm’s own knowledge
The proposal engine does not write instead of the company; it writes with it. The basis is the firm’s own material: past bids, reference projects, certificates, CVs, costing bases. That material lives in the knowledge base — ingested from PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint — and feeds every draft. The result is a draft carrying the company’s own language and substance rather than generic phrasing, checked against the tender’s formal requirements. At every step, the human decides.
An advantage that compounds
Most tools help once and then help equally much forever. Submira is designed to get better with every tender processed, from three sources. First, the knowledge base: every reference and certificate stored sharpens the analysis, because the platform does not assess generically whether a tender is a fit, but whether this company is a fit — which suitability criteria are covered by existing evidence and where a gap remains. Second, the track record: Submira records every outcome and finds the patterns in where the firm wins, where it loses and which reasons recur. Third, the procurement market: from publicly published awards it builds a picture of who wins where, at what magnitudes, and against how many competitors.
Win/loss as a decision basis
The most expensive mistake in public procurement is not the bid that loses; it is the bid that should never have been written. A submission consumes internal capacity that, on complex projects, quickly reaches a five-figure sum. The go/no-go decision is therefore the economically most important moment in the whole process — and in most firms it is taken on instinct. Submira’s win/loss analytics replace instinct with the firm’s own history: success rate by canton, by sector, by contract size, by competitive density. A firm that knows it has won nothing in a given segment for two years decides differently.
Trilingualism is not optional in Switzerland
Awarding bodies publish in their official language. A supplier that only works German-language tenders excludes the Romandie and Ticino — a substantial share of the market. Submira is built for German, French and Italian throughout, in the interface and in document processing. For a Swiss procurement platform that is not an added feature but a precondition.
Data location and security
Tender documents and bid drafts are among the most sensitive files a company holds: they contain costings, references, personal data and the firm’s competitive position. Submira keeps database and delivery in the EU (Frankfurt, eu-central-1) and works to revDSG and GDPR standards, with encryption in transit and at rest, hard tenant isolation and two-factor authentication. SSO is available, as is the option to supply your own AI key so that processing runs under your own vendor agreement. A data processing agreement and subprocessor transparency come with it.
What Submira explicitly is not
Submira is not a substitute for legal review. The AI analyses are an aid that saves time and creates an overview; the assessment and the responsibility stay with the bidding company. Nor is Submira a submission channel — submission happens by whatever route the awarding body prescribes. And Submira claims no influence over the award decision. What the product delivers is capacity: making a formally open market practically accessible to companies that do not run a bid team.
Beta status
Submira is in beta. The platform is usable in production and is being extended continuously; some capabilities are still in progress. The free plan is permanently free and needs no credit card, so the value can be tested against a firm’s own tenders before any decision is due. Submira is a product of Innopulse Consulting GmbH, Zug.