What is Orbid and how is it different from tender management software?

Orbid is an autonomous AI agent, not a SaaS dashboard. Traditional tender management software gives you tools to organize and track bids — you still do the work. Orbid actually does the work: it reads the tender document, interprets every specification row, matches your catalogue, verifies regulatory compliance, and drafts the complete response. You review and submit. The difference is analogous to a word processor versus an author — one is a tool, the other produces the output.

How accurate is Orbid's specification matching?

In production across 14 regulatory regimes, Orbid achieves 97% accuracy on specification-to-product matching. The remaining 3% are flagged for human review — Orbid never guesses. Every match includes a traceable evidence chain linking the tender requirement to specific product data, test reports, and regulatory certificates.

How long does Orbid take to process a tender?

Orbid processed a 162-row medical device tender in 46 seconds during benchmarking. Real-world processing times vary based on tender complexity, but most tenders complete in under 2 minutes. The bottleneck shifts entirely from drafting (days) to human review (hours).

Which regulatory regimes does Orbid support?

Orbid currently supports 14 regulatory regimes including EU MDR, FDA 510(k), UK MHRA, TGA (Australia), Health Canada, ANVISA (Brazil), NMPA (China), PMDA (Japan), CDSCO (India), HSA (Singapore), KFDA (South Korea), Medsafe (New Zealand), SAHPRA (South Africa), and SwissMedic. Coverage expands quarterly based on customer demand.

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Introducing Orbid: The AI Agent That Runs Your Medical Device Tender Response

2026年6月11日

Today we are launching Orbid — an autonomous AI agent purpose-built to run medical device tender responses from intake to draft submission. Orbid is not another form filler. It is not a chatbot bolted onto a document editor. It is an agent that reads tender documents, interprets every specification row, matches your product catalogue, verifies regulatory compliance across 14 regimes, and produces a complete, submission-ready bid response.

If you work in medtech procurement — whether you are a supplier responding to hospital tenders, a distributor managing multi-market bids, or a manufacturer scaling into new territories — Orbid changes the economics of every tender you touch.

Why we built Orbid

Medical device tender response is one of the most labour-intensive, high-stakes processes in healthcare procurement. A typical hospital tender arrives as a spreadsheet with 80 to 300 specification rows. Each row demands a precise product match, supporting documentation, regulatory evidence, and pricing. The mechanical work — reading, matching, cross-referencing, formatting — consumes 70-80% of the total effort. The strategic work — pricing decisions, clinical value arguments, competitive positioning — gets the leftover hours before deadline.

We built MedStrato's platform to automate specification matching and compliance verification. That reduced response times from weeks to days. But we kept hearing the same feedback from procurement teams: "The matching is fast, but we still spend days assembling the full response."

Orbid is the answer. Instead of automating steps within a human workflow, Orbid runs the entire workflow autonomously. You provide the tender document and your product catalogue. Orbid does the rest.

How Orbid works: read, match, comply, draft

Orbid operates in four phases, each running without manual intervention:

Phase 1: Read

Orbid ingests the tender document — PDF, Excel, Word, or scanned images — and parses every specification row, evaluation criterion, submission requirement, and deadline. It understands table structures, nested requirements, conditional clauses, and multi-language documents. Unlike keyword extractors, Orbid comprehends the intent behind each requirement, distinguishing between mandatory pass/fail criteria and scored evaluation factors.

Phase 2: Match

For each specification row, Orbid searches your product catalogue to find the optimal match. It does not simply look for keyword overlap. It evaluates dimensional tolerances, material compatibility, power requirements, connectivity standards, and clinical indications. When multiple products could satisfy a requirement, Orbid ranks them by fit score and flags the alternatives for your review. When no product matches, it tells you — clearly and immediately — rather than forcing a square peg into a round hole.

Phase 3: Comply

This is where most automation tools stop — and where Orbid truly differentiates. For every product match, Orbid verifies regulatory compliance against the applicable regime. Is the EU MDR certificate current? Does the 510(k) clearance cover this specific indication? Is the UDI registered in EUDAMED? Does the ISO 13485 certificate come from an accredited body? Orbid checks all of this automatically, across 14 regulatory regimes, and generates a traceable evidence chain for every compliance claim.

This matters because compliance errors are the single largest source of tender disqualification in medical device procurement. A single expired certificate or mismatched indication can invalidate an entire bid. Orbid eliminates this risk category entirely.

Phase 4: Draft

Finally, Orbid assembles the complete bid response in the format required by the procuring authority. This includes the specification compliance matrix, product datasheets, regulatory documentation package, pricing tables, and any narrative sections (clinical evidence summaries, service level commitments, training plans). The output is a submission-ready document — not a rough draft that needs hours of formatting and polishing.

The numbers: 162 rows in 46 seconds

During production benchmarking, Orbid processed a 162-row hospital equipment tender — covering surgical instruments, patient monitoring systems, and sterilisation equipment — in 46 seconds. The output included complete specification matches, regulatory evidence chains, and a formatted response document.

Key performance metrics from production deployments:

97% accuracy on specification-to-product matching (remaining 3% flagged for human review)
14 regulatory regimes verified automatically (EU MDR, FDA, MHRA, TGA, Health Canada, ANVISA, NMPA, PMDA, CDSCO, HSA, KFDA, Medsafe, SAHPRA, SwissMedic)
Sub-2-minute processing for most standard hospital tenders
85% reduction in total response time versus fully manual workflows
Zero compliance-related disqualifications across all Orbid-processed submissions in pilot programme

These are not theoretical projections. They come from real tenders processed by real teams during our pilot programme. You can see the full ROI breakdown on our pricing page.

Who Orbid is for

Orbid is designed for medical device companies that respond to structured procurement tenders — the kind with specification matrices, compliance requirements, and regulatory documentation demands. Specifically:

Medtech manufacturers responding to hospital and health system tenders across multiple markets
Medical device distributors managing multi-brand catalogues and high tender volumes
Hospital suppliers competing on public procurement platforms (TED, SAM.gov, GeBIZ, KONEPS, etc.)
Procurement teams scaling into new geographic markets without proportionally scaling headcount

If your tenders are primarily narrative-based RFPs (common in IT and consulting) rather than specification-based matrices, Orbid is not the right tool. We built it specifically for the structured, evidence-heavy format that dominates medical device procurement.

How Orbid compares to traditional tender management software

Traditional tender management platforms — including legacy tools and newer entrants — are fundamentally workflow tools. They help you organise tender pipelines, assign tasks to team members, store document templates, and track deadlines. Some add AI-powered features like auto-fill or content suggestion. But the core model is the same: the software provides structure, and humans do the work.

Orbid inverts this model. The agent does the work, and humans provide oversight. Here is how the comparison breaks down across the dimensions that matter:

Capability	Traditional tender software	Orbid
Document parsing	Manual upload and field mapping	Automatic extraction from any format
Specification matching	Keyword search or manual lookup	Semantic matching with dimensional analysis
Compliance verification	Checklist-based (manual)	Automated across 14 regulatory regimes
Response drafting	Template-assisted (human writes)	Complete draft generated autonomously
Evidence chains	Not available	Traceable link from requirement to product data
Processing time (150-row tender)	3-5 days	Under 2 minutes + human review
Regulatory coverage	Typically 1-2 regimes	14 regimes, expanding quarterly

For a detailed feature-by-feature comparison with specific platforms, visit our comparison page.

The end-to-end difference

The key differentiator is not speed, although speed matters. It is the fact that Orbid runs end-to-end without manual intervention on mechanical steps. Your team does not parse the tender document — Orbid does. Your team does not search the catalogue row by row — Orbid does. Your team does not cross-reference regulatory certificates — Orbid does. Your team does not format the response document — Orbid does.

What remains for your team is the work that actually requires human judgment: pricing strategy, competitive positioning, clinical value arguments, and final quality review. This is the work that wins tenders. Everything else is overhead — and Orbid eliminates it.

This is particularly powerful for teams managing high tender volumes. A team of three that previously handled 8-10 tenders per month can now handle 30-40 with the same headcount, because the mechanical work that consumed 70-80% of their time is handled by the agent. The ROI analysis speaks for itself.

Built on MedStrato's foundation

Orbid is not a standalone product. It is built on top of MedStrato's specification matching engine, regulatory intelligence database, and tender monitoring infrastructure. This means it inherits years of domain-specific training data, validated product matching models, and continuously updated regulatory information.

If you are already a MedStrato customer, Orbid is available as an upgrade to your existing workflow. Your product catalogue, regulatory documents, and historical tender data are already in the system — Orbid simply uses them more completely.

If you are new to MedStrato, Orbid is the fastest path to value. You upload your product catalogue and regulatory documentation once. Orbid handles everything from there.

What Orbid does not do

Transparency matters, so here is what Orbid does not do:

Orbid does not make pricing decisions. It populates pricing tables based on your catalogue pricing, but strategic pricing — discounts, bundling, competitive adjustments — requires human judgment.
Orbid does not submit bids. The final review and submission remain with your team. This is deliberate — we believe a human should always approve the final output before it reaches a procuring authority.
Orbid does not fabricate compliance claims. If a product does not have the required certification, Orbid flags the gap rather than generating a plausible-sounding workaround. Every compliance claim is backed by a verifiable document reference.
Orbid does not handle narrative-only RFPs. It is optimised for structured specification tenders. For text-heavy, unstructured RFPs without specification matrices, other tools may be more appropriate.

Getting started with Orbid

Orbid is currently available through our early access programme. During early access, we onboard each customer individually to ensure catalogue integration and regulatory document mapping are correct before the agent starts processing live tenders.

The onboarding process takes 5-7 business days and includes:

Catalogue integration: Upload your product catalogue (or connect via API). Orbid indexes every product, specification, and variant.
Regulatory document mapping: Upload certificates, test reports, and clearance documents. Orbid maps them to the relevant regulatory regimes and products.
Validation run: We process 2-3 of your recent tenders through Orbid and review the output together. This validates accuracy and identifies any catalogue or documentation gaps.
Go live: Orbid starts processing your incoming tenders. Your team reviews and submits.

To learn more about how Orbid fits within MedStrato's broader tender intelligence platform, explore our features page. For pricing details, visit medstrato.com/pricing.

Ready to see Orbid in action? Request early access at medstrato.com/orbid, or book a live demo with our team. We will run one of your real tenders through Orbid during the call — no slides, no hypotheticals, just your tender processed in real time.