Overview
Sequesto develops an agentic OS platform built to support commercial teams in their operations. The company focuses on software development solutions that leverage autonomous agent technology.
Key people
In the news
- I was extremely dubious." That's how Jo Hillman describes her first look at SEQUESTO. Quality, accuracy and compliance are what she's paid for, so an AI writing tender answers had a lot to prove. By her second tender, she had stopped second-guessing what James brought forward. She still reads every answer. She won't claim 100% faith, because she thinks that would be naive on her part - but it's very close. And she has tried to force hallucinations, without managing it yet. James is SEQUESTO's orchestration layer. He works from your
- Can you prove where an AI-written bid answer came from? Once a tender response is submitted, it stops being a draft. It can become contractually binding, and every claim in it is one your organisation has to stand behind. Patrick Dalvinck, CEO and co-founder of SEQUESTO, explains what that means for AI in bidding. A fluent answer isn’t enough. Bid teams need to see which source material each answer was built on, and the reasoning behind it, so they can show what was written and why. That is how James works. James is the AI
- Most bid teams can say who signed off an AI-assisted answer. Far fewer can show how it got there. Reviewers are increasingly asking for both. It tends to come up after the proposal has gone out. Someone senior, someone from legal or the buyer’s procurement team, picks out one answer and wants to know: → What was it based on? → Which bits did AI draft, and which did the team write? → How did it change between drafts? → Who signed off the final version? Simay Aydin Kartoglu shares four practices that help a team answer those
- Why can’t ChatGPT write a winning bid? Ask a general AI model to answer a quality question on a tender and you usually get something fluent and confident. It reads like a bid, just not like a winning one. The usual reaction is to blame the prompt. Jo Hillman has a simpler explanation, and the prompt has nothing to do with it. General models learn from what is public. Tender responses are commercially confidential, so most of these models have never seen a good-quality bid. Learn why that matters for anyone using AI on a live tender.
- Clarification questions are often used only to resolve ambiguity in a tender. Used deliberately, they become part of the bid strategy: they test your reading of what the buyer values and shape how you respond. SEQUESTO Live on Thursday 29 October covers how to plan clarification questions as part of your bid strategy, and how to use AI to help prepare them while the judgement stays with your team. Every registrant receives the Four-Layer Clarification Framework and AI prompts, including those who cannot join live. Register:
- Somewhere above the bid team, a decision is being made about which AI platform the whole company will standardise on. One licence, one security review, one line item. As a way to buy software, it makes perfect sense. Where it goes wrong is quieter. The call is usually made centrally, by IT or an innovation function, with limited visibility into what a regulated, evidence-heavy process actually demands. The licence lands, someone builds a prototype to cover bidding, that person moves to the next priority, and the bid function is
- Tender responses are privileged documents. Jo Hillman on what general-purpose AI is missing in bids. These models learnt from what's public, and good tender responses rarely are. So they have not seen what a good quality response looks like. You can give an AI your own documents. That gives it your content. It doesn't tell it which answers scored well, which ones lost, or why. That knowledge comes from the bid team, which is why strategy and final approval sit with the team. That judgement matters most in the parts of a bid
- Most bid teams read a clarification log for the answers. The questions reveal just as much: who is in the field, what they already hold, and how confident they are. Jo Hillman joins us to show how to use the clarification window strategically: reading the field, turning a defensive question into an offensive one, and knowing when not to ask at all. She closes with AI prompts for the strategic layer that work in whichever assistant you already use. Every registrant receives the four-layer clarification framework and ready-to-use
Backers
Smartfin
Belgian VC firm focused on tech and deep tech, founded and led by Jurgen Ingels.
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