How to find a tender: the complete guide for European businesses

Finding a tender sounds like a search problem, and at the start it is. But the real task has three parts: discovering that an opportunity exists, working out whether you are actually eligible and competitive for it, and getting it in front of the right person at your company before the deadline passes.

A tender itself is a formal request for offers. In the public sector, it is usually called an RFP, an invitation to tender, or a call for tenders, published by a contracting authority such as a ministry, city council, hospital, or state-owned utility. In the private sector, a tender is often just called an RFP or RFQ, issued by a company sourcing a supplier for anything from IT services to industrial components.

Both types follow a similar shape: a description of the need, a set of requirements, a submission deadline, and evaluation criteria. What differs is where they are published and how strict the process is. Public tenders above certain financial thresholds must, by EU law, be advertised in specific ways. Private tenders have no such obligation, and a supplier who only watches government portals will simply never see them.

Public procurement tenders above the EU thresholds are advertised on TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), the EU's official notices database. Below those thresholds, contracts are usually published only on national portals: Hilma in Finland, Mercell and Doffin-linked systems elsewhere in the Nordics, BOAMP in France, and dozens of equivalents across the other member states. There is no single EU tender database that captures everything below the EU-wide threshold; each country runs its own.

Private B2B tenders do not run through any of this. A manufacturer sourcing a new logistics partner, a retail chain sourcing packaging, or a software company sourcing an integration partner will typically post the RFP through its own procurement portal, send it directly to a shortlist of suppliers, or work through a marketplace. There is no legal requirement to advertise these publicly, and no central registry collects them. That is the gap a public-tenders-only search leaves wide open, and it is often the larger opportunity for smaller suppliers who are not set up to compete for large government contracts.

See also: TED tenders explained: how EU public tendering works

Checking TED, three or four national portals, and a handful of industry listing sites by hand is a real job. For a company with a dedicated bid team, that is manageable. For most SMEs it is not, because the person doing it is also running sales, operations, or the business itself.

The practical problems compound. Notices are published in the buyer's language, so a German authority's tender reads in German, a French one in French, and a Finnish one in Finnish, regardless of where the interested supplier is based. Filtering by keyword misses relevant work because procurement documents use CPV codes and formal category language that does not match how a supplier describes its own services. And by the time a relevant notice surfaces in a manual search, the response window may already be half gone.

The result is that qualified small and mid-sized companies miss opportunities year after year. Not because they could not win, but because seeing the right tender in time is a full-time job that nobody at the company actually has. That is not a failure of effort. It is a search problem at a scale manual checking was never built to solve.

The shift that actually helps is moving from checking the portals to being notified when something matches. AURE scans public tenders, including EU-wide TED data, and scores each one against your company profile with AI. The scoring is explainable rather than a keyword filter dressed up as AI: it weighs sector, location, contract size and requirement fit, and shows why a tender scored the way it did, so you judge with your own eyes instead of trusting a black box.

A keyword filter will surface a tender because it contains the word logistics, whether or not your company fits the requirements. Explainable scoring cuts that noise at the source, and it reads the notices in their original languages for you.

The private half works differently, because private RFPs have no central database to scan. On AURE, buyers post their RFPs directly on the platform and the same matching connects them with suppliers, so sellers see private opportunities they would never have found on any portal, and buyers get offers without cold outreach. One stream, both halves of the market, filtered to your profile.

If you want to search public tenders directly rather than relying on alerts, there are a few real starting points worth knowing.

TED is the baseline. It carries contracts above the EU thresholds across all member states, it is free to search, and it is the closest thing to a single EU tender database. But it only covers above-threshold contracts. The thresholds are revised on a two-year cycle and differ by authority and contract type, so check the current figures on the official EU pages rather than relying on a number you saw last year.

Below those thresholds you are in national territory. Finland runs Hilma for domestic notices; most other member states run an equivalent national portal, and coverage, search quality and language vary a lot from one to the next. Searching TED plus every relevant national portal by hand, in multiple languages, is exactly the workload that pushes SMEs toward alerts and matching instead.

See also: Public procurement in Finland: a guide for foreign companies · Julkiset hankinnat pk-yritykselle (in Finnish)

Private-sector RFPs need a different approach, because there is no TED for them. A few tactics actually work:

• Go directly to the buyer: larger companies in construction, manufacturing, logistics and IT often run their own supplier portals where active sourcing needs are posted. Check the procurement or suppliers section of a target company's website before assuming there is nothing to find.
• Get on shortlists before the RFP goes out: many private tenders are sent only to a pre-qualified pool rather than advertised openly, so supplier registration and relationship-building decide what you ever get to see.
• Work your industry network: trade associations, chambers of commerce and export organizations hear about sourcing needs early and often circulate them to members.
• Be present where buyers post: on a platform like AURE, buyers publish RFPs directly and matching puts them in front of the right suppliers, which turns private-tender discovery from luck into a feed.

A workable routine for an SME looks like this: build one thorough company profile, let software watch the public portals and score what appears, keep your private-side visibility warm through registrations and relationships, and spend your actual working hours only on the tenders you can realistically win.

That last part is the point of all of it. The goal of finding tenders was never to read more notices. It is to bid on fewer, better ones. AURE's tender alerts are free, so the watching costs you nothing while you learn what your market publishes.