Built for Canadian contractors and trades

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

Cornerstone is built and run from Edmonton, Alberta. It is one person today, so when you write in you are writing to the person who builds it.

From the founder

Why this exists, in my own words

I lay pipe in Edmonton. Deep utility work, on a crew. That is my job now, not a job I had before I built this.

Public work is not hard to find because it is hidden. It is hard to find because it is scattered. Roads, schools, water systems, rec centres, federal, provincial, municipal — all of it goes out to bid in the open, across dozens of portals that do not talk to each other. None of them tell you which of it fits your shop. And the person who would put the bid together is usually the same person who was on site all day.

I am not an estimator and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I have is the other half of it: I know what the work looks like from the ground, and I know how much is left in a person at the end of a shift for reading portal email. So I built the mechanical part. Cornerstone pulls Canadian public tenders into one feed every morning and scores each one against your trade, your provinces, and the size of job you can carry. The scoring is a fixed set of rules, not a model guessing — it runs the same way every time, and it will show you why it scored what it did. AI is reserved for the proposal draft and nothing else.

Where this actually stands: the portals are pulled and scored every morning, the proposal drafter works, and the company is early enough that you would be among the first people using it in earnest. I would rather say that plainly than dress it up. If something is wrong, I am the one who fixes it, and I would rather hear it from you than guess.

If you bid public work for a 5 to 50 person Canadian construction firm — civil, mechanical, electrical, concrete, or any of the trades that show up on those jobs — this is built for you. If you are a procurement officer on the buyer side, you are not the customer here; Bonfire and Periscope are. Trying to be both makes a worse product for everyone.

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 contact@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.