91̽»¨

• Aaro Angerpuro is the co-founder of Viran, a public-sector sales intelligence platform helping companies identify government contracts they might otherwise miss.
• With a background in strategy consulting, Aaro is focused on solving a much bigger problem than tender discovery. His ambition is to make public-sector demand easier for suppliers to understand and act on across different markets, languages and procurement systems.
• As a founder, Aaro prioritises learning quickly by selling early and using customer conversations and revenue as feedback on what truly matters.
• Aaro’s leadership philosophy centres on ownership and creating value.

Tell Me About Yourself and Viran

I’m Aaro Angerpuro, co-founder of Viran. We are the intelligence layer for public-sector sales.

Every week, our systems process more than 200,000 new public-sector opportunities across more than 80 markets, read the underlying procurement documents and match them against what our customers actually sell.

We keep finding large, relevant contracts for companies that already have dedicated public-sector sales teams and had simply never seen them. That is the problem in one sentence. Public money is spent in public, and suppliers still miss it.

Our customers range from high-growth technology companies and manufacturers to Nasdaq-listed businesses, operating across Europe, Asia and the US. My background is in strategy consulting, and I studied at Aalto University in Helsinki.

What Inspired You To Start Viran, and What Problem Were You Trying To Solve?

Public procurement is one of the largest markets in the world, and the infrastructure around selling into it is still remarkably fragmented.

A company can be perfectly qualified for a multimillion-euro contract and never see it because it was published in the wrong portal, country or language. Even after finding it, a sales team may need to work through hundreds of pages just to decide whether it is worth pursuing at all. Many of those decisions still end up being made largely by instinct.

We saw an opportunity to build something much larger than a tender search tool. Viran is designed to continuously map public-sector demand, understand what buyers are asking for and connect that demand with the suppliers capable of delivering it.

What Has Been Your Biggest Challenge So Far, and How Did You Overcome It?

Building something that large listed corporations can genuinely trust.

We are an early-stage company, while some of our customers operate at enormous scale. Earning that trust takes time.

It is relatively easy to build an AI demo that reads a tender and produces an impressive answer. It is much harder to build a production system that works every day across different languages, procurement systems, document formats and countries, and that knows when it is unsure.

Our approach has been to treat AI as one component of the system rather than the entire system. We combine models with structured data, deterministic validation and clear controls around execution. Every recommendation is traceable back to the procurement documents it came from.

In production, reliability, traceability and knowing when not to automate matter far more than an impressive one-off result. That is an unfashionable thing to say right now, but it is also part of how you earn the right to work with serious customers.

Can You Describe a Pivotal Moment That Significantly Shaped the Direction of Viran?

Realising that discovery itself was a much larger problem than we had assumed.

We originally thought companies mainly struggled with analysing tenders and preparing bids. Once we started working with international suppliers, we kept seeing the same thing: they were missing relevant opportunities entirely.

In several cases, we found significant open contracts for companies with dedicated public-sector sales teams, in markets those teams considered themselves to be covering.

That changed how we thought about Viran. The opportunity was much larger than making individual procurement tasks easier. We could help companies understand the public-sector market itself much better.

How Do You Define Success?

For your business: Success would be making public-sector sales almost seamless. For any company with a digital or physical product, Viran should be able to understand what they sell, surface every relevant opportunity across their markets, decide which ones are worth pursuing and eventually help take the bid all the way through submission. The bigger reason this matters is that governments buy the things that shape everyday life: roads, schools, hospitals, software and infrastructure. If we can make it easier for the right suppliers to find and compete for those contracts, buyers get better options and public money gets spent better. That is the end state I care about: the best supplier should not lose simply because they never saw the opportunity or because the procurement process was too fragmented to navigate.

As a founder: Building something genuinely useful, globally relevant, difficult to replicate, and that people truly love using. I also care a lot about the speed of learning. I would rather put a product in front of customers, find out where it breaks and improve it quickly rather than spend months perfecting assumptions internally. The founder’s job is ultimately to keep improving the quality of decisions: what to build, what not to build, where to focus and what actually matters to customers.

What Advice Would You Give To Someone Thinking About Launching Their Own Startup?

Start selling before the product is ready, and long before it feels comfortable.

A customer conversation creates clarity faster than almost anything else you can do. Someone either has the problem, has budget for it and wants it solved, or they do not. Everything you build before that conversation is a guess with a nice interface on it.

I would also avoid over-optimising for startup conventions. Especially in the age of AI, you do not necessarily need funding, a large team or a perfect product to build something valuable.

Revenue is one of the best forms of feedback because customers become much more precise about what matters once they are actually paying you.

What’s Next for Viran? Any Exciting Developments We Should Watch Out For?

We are continuing to expand Viran internationally and deepen the value we provide to companies selling to governments.

Today, the platform already processes more than 200,000 new opportunities every week across more than 80 markets. Our focus is on making that global public-sector market increasingly understandable and actionable for suppliers.

We are also starting work on the buyer side, where technology can help public organisations improve procurement and attract more competition. The need is significant: the European Court of Auditors found that 41.8% of EU procurement procedures in 2021 received only one bid. Helping public buyers attract more qualified suppliers is something we genuinely want to contribute to.

The long-term ambition is to make Viran the global intelligence infrastructure around public procurement.

Want to be featured as 91̽»¨â€™s Founder of the Week? Find out more about this weekly feature and how to get involved here.

Founder’s 5 with Aaro Angerpuro

We wanted to know a bit more about the man behind Viran, so we’ve put together the exclusive Founders’ 5 with Aaro Angerpuro.

Favourite business tool

Linear. Product work, commercial priorities and operational issues in one place, while being fully AI-agent friendly.

One lesson you learned the hard way?

Pick a problem you are genuinely interested in. If things go well, you will spend years thinking about the same market, talking to the same kinds of customers and working through increasingly specific problems. Choose something you are curious enough about to stay with for a long time.

One future trend you’re watching?

The rise of the agentic state.

Governments will increasingly integrate agentic systems directly into public-sector processes: procurement, permitting, benefits administration, inspections, case handling and internal decision support.

The interesting question is not whether governments will use AI, but where they will first let a system move from assisting a civil servant to executing part of a process itself. That shift will require strong controls, auditability and clear accountability, but it could fundamentally change how the state operates.

One quote you live by

“Create more value than you capture.” — Tim O’Reilly.

The strongest companies create value not only for themselves, but for their customers and the wider systems around them.

One book/podcast you recommend

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin.

Take responsibility for the outcome instead of explaining why something went wrong. In an early-stage company, almost every problem eventually comes back to what you chose to prioritise, communicate or execute.

Want to be featured as 91̽»¨â€™s Founder of the Week? Know someone who deserves to be recognised as a founder making waves in the startup landscape? Find out more about this weekly feature and how to get involved here.