In Conversation with Rishi Dadhich: Why India’s Tendering Problem Isn’t What You Think-TBT
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In Conversation with Rishi Dadhich: Why India’s Tendering Problem Isn’t What You Think

New Delhi [India], August 12: India’s tendering ecosystem moves trillions of rupees every year, yet most of the friction in that system happens long before a single bid is submitted. Rishi Dadhich,...

TBT Online Desk
August 12, 2026 3 Min Read
New Delhi [India], August 12: India’s tendering ecosystem moves trillions of rupees every year, yet most of the friction in that system happens long before a single bid is submitted. Rishi Dadhich, founder of Bidwiser, has spent years watching engineering and consulting firms lose winnable opportunities, not to competitors, but to process. For him, the issue is not a lack of visibility. It is what happens after a tender is found. “Most existing tendering platforms are procurement-discovery tools,” he says. “They help you find tenders, but they don’t touch the monotonous work around actually bidding.” That work, in his view, is where the real drag sits. BD teams in EPC and consulting firms often spend their weeks manually tracking 150-plus tender websites, trying to ensure nothing slips through. They spend days reading and analyzing a single tender document, clause by clause, just to decide if it is relevant. Then comes the heavy lift: building bid documents, forms, formats, and methodology from scratch, every single time. “That is the repeated, low-value work that eats a BD team’s week,” He says. “Bidwiser automates it, so BD managers spend their time chasing opportunities and winning projects instead of wrestling with documentation.” The idea to build the platform came from a moment that felt too personal to ignore. The co-founder is also his mother. At the time, he was working in Chicago as a senior generative AI engineer, and she had come to visit him in the US. Even while traveling, she was still handling an important tender for her consultancy back in India. Because of the time difference, she ended up working through the night to stay in sync with her team, extracting clauses, preparing, and verifying bid documents almost entirely on her own. “Watching that happen right in front of me is what triggered the idea,” He recalls. “I have been working on solving this problem for the Indian procurement system ever since.” Today, he sees EPC and consulting firms losing the most time in two places: creating bidding documents and reading full tenders in detail to ensure nothing is missed. A single missed clause can disqualify a bid at the technical stage, before commercial terms even come into play. That is the exact problem Bidwiser is built to solve.
In Conversation with Rishi Dadhich: Why India’s Tendering Problem Isn’t What You Think-TBT
In a market crowded with “AI for X” startups, He is clear about why tendering is different. India’s procurement landscape runs through more than 150 issuing platforms, and every document is structured differently depending on which department or PSU wrote it. The stakes are high: a missed clause does not just cost time. It can kill a bid entirely. “That level of legal and financial risk is why a generic AI wrapper doesn’t hold up here,” he says. Bidwiser has built and fine-tuned its own proprietary LLM specifically on the 4 Lakh + tenders. The model is trained to understand clause structures, eligibility criteria, and document formats the way someone who has spent years reading these tenders would, not the way a general-purpose model pattern-matches. That domain depth, he argues, is what separates a discovery tool from a true bid-management platform. “People sometimes compare us directly to platforms like TenderTiger or Tender24x7,” He says. “Surfacing the right tenders is part of what we do, but it is one part. What actually sets us apart is end-to-end AI-driven bid management: our models don’t just help you find and evaluate tenders accurately. They help you build the bid itself.” The team’s benchmark is stark: they can develop a full bid in a day. That shifts the conversation from “how many tenders can we find?” to “how many tenders can we realistically pursue and win?” Looking ahead, Rishi sees Bidwiser starting in India and then expanding outward. The company’s IP and complexity are built around what he calls “the hardest version of this problem.” Indian procurement is genuinely more fragmented and complex than most international markets. If Bidwiser can win here and prove real ROI for companies, moving into markets where procurement is more standardized becomes a far easier problem to solve. As India’s infrastructure spend continues to grow, the firms that win may not be the biggest. They will be the ones who can see the opportunity fastest and decide even faster. For Rishi, that speed will not come from working longer hours. It will come from finally automating the parts of tendering that were never meant to be done by hand.

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India’s Tendering ProblemRishi Dadhich

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