About Tender Radar

Why it exists

UK public procurement is published, but it is not surfaced. Notices are split across four national portals, each with its own thresholds, search behaviour and quirks, and none of them will tell you which of this morning's notices matter to you, which contracts are about to come round again, or who currently holds the work.

Organisations deal with that in one of two ways. Either somebody is given the job of checking portals every morning, which is expensive and gets skipped in a busy week, or nobody checks, and the first you hear of a contract is when the deadline has passed.

Tender Radar does the checking. It reads all four portals overnight, scores every new notice against a profile you control, and sends one ranked digest before 9am. Strong matches at the top, nothing underneath that you did not need to see.

Levelling the playing field

The information that wins public contracts is published. When a contract ends, who holds it and what it was worth are in the award notices, published under the Open Government Licence. The large contractors see it put together, because they can pay thousands of pounds a year for intelligence platforms and have bid teams to read them. Small firms, charities and social enterprises mostly see a contract when the tender is published, by which point the specification is written.

Tender Radar exists to close that gap, and the low price is deliberate. £30 a month is a choice about who gets access, not a sign of a cut-down product.

It works from the buyer's side too. Public sector buyers can use Tender Radar free to look for suppliers before they go to market, and it shows them the small firms, charities and social enterprises that have already done that kind of work. So smaller organisations are not only finding contracts; buyers are finding them.

What sits behind the digest

The digest runs on a full award history, not only on what was published today. That history is what makes the renewal radar possible: because contract end dates are mapped, the service can tell you that an incumbent contract is coming up for re-tender long before the re-tender is advertised, which is the point at which a conversation with the buyer is still worth having.

All of the procurement data comes from the official sources. Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Nothing is scraped from behind a paywall and nothing is bought from a reseller. Where the data comes from sets out what each portal covers and what it misses.

Who builds it

Tender Radar is built and run by Professor AI Holdings Ltd, the company behind The Professor-AI, the AI advisory practice of Paul Noon OBE, Emeritus Professor of AI and Innovation and a former Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Coventry University.

That background is the reason the product is shaped this way. Most of the advisory work is with boards and senior teams deciding where AI genuinely earns its place and where it is being sold to them. Tender Radar is the same judgement applied to one narrow, unglamorous problem: procurement notices are a scoring and filtering task, machines are good at scoring and filtering, and the useful output is a shorter list, not a cleverer interface.

How we treat your information

The profile you build, your keywords, CPV codes, target buyers and value thresholds, is used to score notices for you and for nothing else. It is not sold, and it is not pooled with other subscribers' profiles. Professor AI Holdings Ltd is Cyber Essentials certified. The privacy policy sets out exactly what is held and who else processes it.

Keeping up with the thinking

Paul writes a weekly briefing for boards and senior teams on where AI is genuinely useful and where it is being oversold. It is not about Tender Radar, and you do not need to be a subscriber here to read it. The Professor-AI newsletter.

Contact

Questions about the service, the data or an invoice: admin@theprofessor.info