Use case

Defence and security tenders in Europe and the UK

Defence and security opportunities are spread across EU and UK procurement services and EU funding programmes. ADEVIA searches them together from one plain-language query, so your team can spend its time deciding what to bid on rather than checking portals.

Who it is for

ADEVIA is built for people whose job is to find the right public opportunities early and decide quickly whether to pursue them:

Defence and security suppliers – primes, integrators and SMEs looking for contracts that match their products and services.
Bid teams who need to qualify opportunities and share them with colleagues.
Business development staff tracking a market, a buyer or a capability across countries.

The job is the same in each case: describe what you are looking for once, see the notices that match, and pass the promising ones on. You can save tenders and searches, email a tender summary to confirmed colleagues, or download it as a Word file.

Where defence tenders are published

European Union: TED

In the EU, defence and sensitive security procurement falls under Directive 2009/81/EC, and notices above the EU thresholds are published on TED (Tenders Electronic Daily). ADEVIA searches TED with full-text search across EU member states and EEA countries.

Defence notices are often worded in ways a keyword search would miss. CPV division 35 covers “Security, fire-fighting, police and defence equipment”. ADEVIA uses CPV divisions to find same-category notices even when the wording differs from your query, and shows them separately as related opportunities so they do not crowd out direct matches.

United Kingdom: Find a Tender and Contracts Finder

In the UK, higher-value public opportunities appear on Find a Tender, and contracts in England, including lower-value ones, on Contracts Finder. ADEVIA searches both. Find a Tender is searched through ADEVIA’s own rolling index of roughly the last 90 days of notices, because its public API has no keyword search.

Be aware that opportunities published only on the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Sourcing Portal (DSP) are not included.

EU defence funding: the European Defence Fund

European Defence Fund calls are published on the EU Funding & Tenders Portal. ADEVIA includes them when your query asks for grants or funding – for example “European Defence Fund grants” – so ordinary procurement searches stay free of grant calls.

See all sources and their limits for more detail.

Example searches

Type these into ADEVIA as they are written:

open defence tenders
radar tenders past 10 days
counter-drone systems in Estonia
cybersecurity grants past 30 days
cpv 35000000 in UK past 30 days

How to write a good query

Write the query the way you would describe it to a colleague. Then narrow it:

Add a country or a region – “in Estonia”, “in UK”, or a region or city such as Bavaria or London.
Add a time window – “past 10 days”, “past 30 days”.
Add a value or a deadline – “over €5m”, “closing this month”.
Quote exact phrases – "secure communications" matches that phrase rather than either word on its own.
Name the buyer with “from” – for example “from Ministry of Defence”.
Use a CPV code when you know the category – for example “cpv 35000000”.

You can search in your own language. If you already know a notice, paste its TED publication number or UK Find a Tender OCID to go straight to it.

Results can be filtered by stage, such as open tenders or awards, and by source.