India’s biggest customer is the Government of India, and it does not have a single storefront. It has hundreds of portals.

The World Bank estimates public procurement at roughly 20 per cent of India’s GDP, putting the wider opportunity at about ₹70 lakh crore. Government e Marketplace (GeM), through which ministries, PSUs and departments buy everything from stationery to steel, completed ten years this August with ₹20 lakh crore in cumulative purchases. Annual purchases on the portal grew from ₹422 crore in its first full year to more than ₹5 lakh crore in each of the last two. GeM took over eight years to reach its first ₹10 lakh crore, then less than two to reach the next.

The opportunity is immense. Access to it is not.

A Large Market, Scattered Across Systems

GeM is only one channel. In the FY 2025-26 budget, defence procurement alone stands at ₹6.81 lakh crore, while infrastructure capital expenditure is ₹11.21 lakh crore, much of it routed through other systems. Central tenders above ₹25 lakh appear on CPPP, Railways uses IREPS and Defence has defproc.gov.in. States use portals under GePNIC, while PSUs such as Coal India, NTPC and Indian Oil publish separately.

Financial rules require e-procurement above a threshold, but they do not require one common portal. Tender trackers estimate that a serious bidder needs to monitor more than 30 portals, each with its own login, search logic and deadlines. Keeping pace with all of them is unrealistic even for a mid-sized manufacturer or EPC contractor with a dedicated business development team.

Digital procurement has widened participation. MSEs have won over ₹9 lakh crore on GeM, representing 45.6 per cent of cumulative purchases and comfortably exceeding the mandated quota. An IIT Delhi study covering 101 items from FY 2023-24 to FY 2025-26 found that GeM prices were lower in 74.3 per cent of cases, with savings of 13.6 per cent. But a more efficient portal cannot help a capable business compete for a tender it never saw.

“When we sit with a mid-size manufacturer, the most common thing we hear isn’t that they lost a bid. It’s that they never knew the tender existed until after it closed. That’s not a capability problem. That’s a discovery problem, and it’s a solvable one.”

Pankaj Modi, Founder, Tender247

The Cost of Not Knowing

That blind spot is the business of Tender247. The company tracks tenders from government bodies, public sector companies and large private buyers across hundreds of portals, helping businesses find opportunities suited to their capabilities.

Most tendering work happens before a bid is submitted: finding relevant notices, checking what competitors quoted last time, preparing documents, managing deadlines and keeping a team aligned. Tender247 brings these tasks into a single system, using AI to identify relevant tenders, automate paperwork and give teams a shared view of the process. According to the company, this can reduce the time needed for a bid by roughly 90 per cent, enabling even a small team to pursue far more opportunities.

“Large contractors have always had someone whose entire job was tracking portals and pricing out rivals. We turned that role into a smart subscription.”

Pankaj Modi, Founder, Tender247

Why Anupam Kher Fits

This week, Tender247 announced Anupam Kher as its brand ambassador in what the company says is the tender industry’s first celebrity association. The choice is unusual by design. A category long sold through trade directories and cold calls is being introduced to India’s boardrooms with the familiarity of a consumer brand.

Kher fits that story because, across four decades, he has repeatedly played the Indian the system was not built for: someone who loses not for lack of ability, but for lack of access. Tender247 is built around the same argument.

“India’s businesses are not asking for favours. They are asking to see the same information the big players have always had. If my face on a hoarding makes one factory owner in Rajkot check which tenders closed in his sector last month, this association has done its work.”

Anupam Kher

Making the Market Easier to Read

The association’s ambition extends beyond visibility. Tender247 also plans to publish quarterly market intelligence, starting with a figure the industry rarely sees: the total value of tenders that receive no competing bid at all.

That may be the larger ambition: not simply to help businesses find more tenders, but to make one of India’s largest markets easier for more of them to read, understand and enter.