Built by contractors, for contractors

The problem

Public-sector procurement in Canada is fragmented across CanadaBuys, MERX, SaskTenders, APC, Biddingo, City of Toronto, and a long tail of municipal portals. Small and mid-sized contractors burn hours every week just tracking what's open — and then more hours qualifying whether a tender is actually winnable. Most bids never get submitted because the deadline passes before anyone looks closely.

What we built

Cornerstone Contracts ingests procurement portals every morning, scores each opportunity against your trade, geography, bonding capacity, and past performance, and surfaces the bids most worth your time. When you're ready, our AI drafts a complete proposal — formatted to the buyer's tender format and pre-checked against the trade-agreement and provincial-code rules that apply to that jurisdiction.

Matching is algorithmic and instant. AI is reserved for the proposal itself — where it actually saves time. You stay in control of every bid you submit.

Where we're from

We're based in Edmonton, Alberta. The platform was built in close conversation with working contractors and tradespeople — the people who told us what was actually broken about chasing public-sector work in Canada today.

From the founder

Why this exists, in my own words

I started watching small Alberta contractors lose bids they had every right to win — not on price, not on capability, but on logistics. One civil shop I knew had to walk away from a six-figure municipal package because their estimator was already on three other proposals that week and couldn't get this one out the door. The work was a dead match for the firm. The format wasn't the problem; the calendar was. That's not how this should work, and Cornerstone is the tool I started building to close that gap.

I've spent the last decade in software and the last few years close enough to the trades to see what their week actually looks like. I'm not pretending to be an estimator — I'm building the tool I keep wishing existed every time I watch one work. The matcher and the AI proposal drafter are both built around the same instinct: estimators don't need more leads, they need fewer false positives and faster first drafts.

Two things changed at the same time. AI-drafted proposals only became reliable in 2023 — before that, generated text needed enough rewriting that it didn't actually save anyone time. And Canadian procurement has stayed fragmented enough that no US-built incumbent has bothered to localize for it. CanadaBuys, BC Bid, Alberta Purchasing Connection, MERX, SaskTenders, SEAO, and a long tail of municipal portals — that's the work, and nobody was bringing all of it into one place for the contractor side.

If you run estimating for a 5–50 person Canadian construction firm — civil, mechanical, electrical, concrete, or any of the trades that bid public-sector work — this is built for you. If you're a procurement officer on the buyer side, you're not our customer; Bonfire and Periscope are. We don't try to be both. The wrong-side customer makes every product worse.

I commit to a few things in writing. Pricing transparency. Canadian data residency. No annual lock-in. No algorithmic discrimination. Your data isn't the product. The full list is on the principles page — public, dated, never silently edited.

If you ever want to talk shop — about a bid, a feature gap, or anything else — write to me directly at joseph@cornerstonecontracts.com. I read every one.

— Joseph Morrison

Founder, Cornerstone Contracts · Edmonton, AB

What we don't do

• We don't submit bids on your behalf — every proposal is reviewed and submitted by you.
• We don't guarantee bid success. AI drafts are a starting point, not a finish line.
• We don't sell your data. Profile and bid information stays yours.

See the full principles page for the eight commitments we've made publicly and don't silently revise.