Aprena assembles the best-fit team for each client project from your engineers, matching proven skills to what the work needs.
4 of 5 roles filled by your own people. Add one QA contractor to the quote.
Sales forwards a 40-page RFP. The proposal is due on Friday.
Two tech leads drop billable work to work out what the project needs and guess which engineers have done anything like it.
The bid promises a strong Kotlin team, at a price built on those guesses.
Your only Kotlin engineer is booked on another project. A contractor fills the gap, paid out of your margin.
Working out one bid by hand can take a senior lead up to a week. On fixed price, every wrong guess about your people comes straight out of gross margin. The guesses tend to go wrong in four ways.
For every role the project needs, a ranked list of your engineers who have done it. Each name comes with the projects that prove it, taken from their CVs.
Aprena reads the RFP and lists the roles, seniority and must-have skills in ESCO, the EU's open skill standard. Your engineers' profiles use the same standard, so the matching compares like with like. Your tech lead corrects the list before it starts.
The team you would put on the project, priced at your internal rates, and how much buffer you need to stay above your margin floor.
For each role, Aprena ranks your engineers by how well their past projects match and marks each one ready, develop or critical gap. You see who needs a quick check, who could get up to speed, who frees up later, and when to bring in a contractor or hire.
Example: the Android developer role from the patient portal bid
| Option | Status | Free from | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pavel S.Built two Android apps in Kotlin. The last one shipped in 2019. | ready | Week 1 | Check |
| Dmitri K.Shipped a Kotlin Android app this year. Half-time on another project until week 6. | ready | Week 6 | Wait |
| Irina V.Android in Java since 2021. Has not used Kotlin coroutines or Jetpack Compose. | develop | Week 4 | Train |
| Contractor or partner teamNobody else in-house has shipped Android in three years. A contractor you trust can start now. | critical gap | Week 1 | Contract |
| New hireA permanent Android developer, if the project runs long. | critical gap | Week 10 | Hire |
Your delivery lead picks one of these. What it costs goes into the budget before the bid goes out.
You send us CVs and your org chart. Aprena maps every engineer's skills to ESCO, so you don't need a skills matrix of your own. Every score comes from a real project, and your leads can correct any of them. Where a CV is vague or old, the engineer gets a few short questions. You add rates, and who is booked where for how much of the week.
Aprena works out which roles and skills the project needs and checks every engineer against them. You get a ranked list of people for each role, each marked ready, develop or critical gap, with warnings about skills that are out of date or that only one person has.
Your tech lead reviews the draft and fixes what Aprena got wrong. Sales gets a price that delivery has already checked against real people.
Replace the defaults with your own numbers.
Yearly cost of scoping bids by hand
$0
We set up one practice or squad, then run two live bids through Aprena, so you can put its answer next to the estimate your leads made by hand.
“I'll break your project down, or take the rough breakdown you already have, and fit it to your people.”
Julia has spent twelve years building products around people's careers. She worked at two outsourcing companies, ran internal projects and built a tool for putting project teams together. Scoping one bid by hand took her about a week: reading the requirements, breaking the work down, a rough schedule, finding the right people, the budget and the risks. Aprena takes over the team-assembly part, across your whole bench.
Julia TiFounder and CEO, Aprena
No. In the pilot we set up 15 to 25 engineers in the first week, from their CVs and your org chart. You don't need a skills matrix: Aprena maps skills to ESCO, the European Commission's open skill standard, and if you already keep a matrix, we match it to ESCO. Engineers only answer questions where their CV leaves a skill unclear.
No. Aprena drafts the list of roles, the people who fit each one and what to do about the gaps. Your lead reviews it, corrects it and signs off before anything reaches sales.
Your delivery lead. For each open role Aprena ranks the people who fit, marks each one ready, develop or critical gap, shows what the closest ones are missing, and suggests whether to check them, train them, wait for them, bring in a contractor or partner team, or hire.
A spreadsheet works until two bids land in the same week and the one engineer who knows HL7 is promised to both. The pilot puts Aprena's answer next to your leads' estimate on the same RFP, so you judge it on a bid you already know.
Estimation tools price roles, not your people. Resource planners schedule projects that someone has already scoped. Aprena works one step earlier: it reads the RFP, finds which of your engineers have done that kind of work, and flags who needs checking before you count on them. Keep your planner for scheduling once the deal is signed.
On T&M the client pays for the overrun, until they stop renewing. Aprena checks that you have the people the bid promises, whatever the billing model. On fixed-price and capped contracts it also shows what a wrong guess about your people would cost you before you sign.
$490 a month for up to 50 engineers, $890 for up to 100, and $1,690 for up to 200. PM and sales seats are unlimited on every plan.
We're in the pilot phase: one paid pilot is live and two more are in discussion. As an early partner you get a direct line to Julia and a real say in the roadmap. If you'd rather wait, we'll say so on the call.
Files are stored on servers we rent from Hetzner. CVs and RFPs are processed through the OpenAI API, which does not use API data to train its models. We sign an NDA and agree data terms with you before you send the first file.
No deck. We'll look at how you staff and price projects, walk through what a pilot would look like for you, and you'll leave with something useful either way.
Book a pilot call