Bidwise AI
Pre-seed funded · Fractional CTO · 2025 – Present
UK public-sector procurement
Took a prototype eSourcing portal from founder-built demo to production-ready, two-sided procurement platform — while closing pre-seed and standing up the founding engineering team.
Bidwise AI was a founder-led prototype targeting AI-assisted bid writing for suppliers responding to UK public-sector tenders. Promising demos, real design partners, but a single non-technical founder, no engineering hires, and a seed conversation starting in weeks. The product also needed to expand beyond suppliers to serve buyers — framework providers and procurement managers — which is where the bigger market was.
Three things needed to happen in parallel, none of which the founder could do alone: decide whether the prototype's architecture could carry a two-sided product or needed a rebuild; get a credible technical story and a technical counterparty in front of pre-seed investors; and hire a founding engineering team without burning runway on the wrong first hires.
What I did
- Re-architected the prototype into a production monorepo
Carried the supplier and buyer journeys, shared design system, mock-SAP integration for enterprise pilots, and a tender-scraping pipeline feeding the AI bid workflows.
- Closed pre-seed alongside the founder
Owned the technical diligence track, built the financial model, ran SeedLegals contracting, and was the technical counterparty on investor calls.
- Hired the founding engineering team end-to-end
Wrote the hiring plan, designed the interview loop, ran technicals, made offers. Three founding engineers hired.
- Expanded the product from one-sided to two-sided
Grew the platform beyond suppliers to serve buyers as well — framework providers and procurement managers — opening the larger market without disrupting the seed conversation or design-partner pilots.
- Set the 12-month roadmap to seed milestone
Tied to two design-partner pilots — one supplier-side, one buyer-side framework provider.
- Built client-specific features for sales demos
Shaped the product surface to what each prospect needed to see to progress the deal, rather than insisting they meet a generic demo halfway.
Trade-offs I'd defend
Default would have been AWS, but the design partners and target enterprise buyers were Microsoft shops with SAP integration requirements. Optimised for buyer-side sales motion over engineer familiarity.
Used the Untitled UI Figma library as the design-system spine instead of rolling our own — saved ~6 weeks of design-system work to redirect into product surface area.
Outcomes
A MENA-based enterprise technology buyer needed an SAP integration to move forward in their evaluation. SAP's partner-onboarding timeline didn't fit the sales cycle — we were weeks away from losing the meeting. Instead of waiting, I built a SAP-lookalike service that mirrored the real SAP API shape and the specific PO flow the demo needed, layered the Bidwise procurement flow on top, and ran the end-to-end demo as if the integration were live. The deal progressed to the second meeting. Without it, it would have stalled in the sales cycle. The mock-SAP service still lives in the dev stack and now doubles as a local-development SAP for new engineers.
When the by-the-book path doesn't fit the runway, find the version of the technical answer that unblocks the commercial moment without burning the architecture behind it.
Continuing as Fractional CTO through seed: scaling the engineering team, hardening the production platform for the first paying buyer-side pilot, and supporting the seed raise.
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Ready to scale your engineering?
Book a 30-minute discovery call. If we're not a fit, I'll tell you on the call — and point you toward someone who is.