UK public-sector procurement
AI procurement startup
Took a prototype eSourcing portal from founder-built demo to a production-ready, two-sided procurement platform — while the pre-seed closed and the founding engineering team came together.
- Role
- Founding technical partner
- Stage
- Pre-seed funded
- Sector
- UK public-sector procurement
Outcomes
- Round closed
- Pre-seedRound closed
- Production launch (buyer + supplier)
- 0 → 1Production launch (buyer + supplier)
- Founding engineers hired
- 3Founding engineers hired
- Enterprise integration path shipped
- SAPEnterprise integration path shipped
Context
The client 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.
The problem
Three things had 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.
- 01
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.
- 02
Closed pre-seed alongside the founder
Owned the technical diligence track, built the financial model, ran SeedLegals contracting, and acted as the technical counterparty on investor calls.
- 03
Hired the founding engineering team end-to-end
Wrote the hiring plan, designed the interview loop, ran the technicals, made the offers. Three founding engineers hired.
- 04
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 the design-partner pilots.
- 05
Set the 12-month roadmap to seed milestone
Tied to two design-partner pilots — one supplier-side, one buyer-side framework provider.
- 06
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.
The Maverick moment: the SAP we couldn’t get
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 — the meeting was weeks from being lost. Rather than wait, we built a SAP-lookalike service that mirrored the real SAP API shape and the specific PO flow the demo needed, layered the client’s procurement flow on top, and ran the end-to-end demo as if the integration were live. The deal progressed to a 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.
Takeaway
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.
Trade-offs
Every architecture is a set of things you chose not to have. These are the ones that mattered here.
Azure over AWS
The default would have been AWS, but the design partners and target enterprise buyers were Microsoft shops with SAP integration requirements. Optimised for the buyer-side sales motion over engineer familiarity.
Bought design tokens, built the rest
Used the Untitled UI Figma library as the design-system spine instead of rolling our own — saving roughly six weeks of design-system work to redirect into product surface area.
Stack
- TypeScript
- Next.js
- Python
- LLM orchestration
- Azure
- Postgres
- SAP (mock + integration path)
Capabilities applied
What’s next
Continuing through seed: scaling the engineering team, hardening the production platform for the first paying buyer-side pilot, and supporting the raise.