The Tender247 Story: Turning tender intelligence into a competitive advantage with Anupam Kher

In India's vast and fragmented Rs. 70 lakh crore procurement economy, Tender247 is using AI-powered intelligence to help businesses discover opportunities, make informed decisions, and compete more effectively. With Anupam Kher joining as its brand ambassador, the company is now taking its vision of making tender intelligence more accessible to a wider audience.

According to the company, the Government of India represents one of the country's largest sources of business opportunities¹. Instead of operating through a single procurement platform, these opportunities are spread across hundreds of government portals, where thousands of companies can discover and compete for contracts. For businesses, the challenge isn't always a lack of capability or ambition. Often, it's simply knowing where the right opportunities exist, understanding their requirements and having the resources to pursue them.

This is the challenge Tender247 is addressing by turning scattered tender information into actionable business intelligence. And with actor Anupam Kher joining as its brand ambassador, the company is now looking to bring greater visibility to the role tender intelligence can play in helping Indian businesses grow.


The scale of the opportunity is substantial.

The World Bank estimates public procurement at roughly 20 per cent of India's GDP, putting the wider market at approximately Rs. 70 lakh crore².

Government e-Marketplace (GeM), through which ministries, PSUs and government departments purchase everything from stationery to steel, completed ten years this August with Rs. 20 lakh crore in cumulative purchases². Annual purchases have grown from Rs. 422 crore in its first full year to more than Rs. 5 lakh crore in each of the last two years. While GeM took over eight years to reach its first Rs. 10 lakh crore, the next Rs. 10 lakh crore came in less than two².

The opportunity is immense. But finding and pursuing the right opportunities remains far from simple.

A large market, scattered across systems

GeM represents only one part of India's extensive procurement ecosystem.

In the FY 2025–26 budget, defence procurement alone stood at Rs. 6.81 lakh crore, while infrastructure capital expenditure was pegged at Rs. 11.21 lakh crore, with opportunities spread across multiple procurement channels².

Central government tenders above Rs. 25 lakh appear on the Central Public Procurement Portal (CPPP)³. Indian Railways uses IREPS, defence procurement has a separate portal, and states operate through platforms under the Government e-Procurement System of National Informatics Centre (GePNIC). Major PSUs, including Coal India, NTPC and Indian Oil, also publish tenders independently³.

While financial rules require electronic procurement beyond specified thresholds, they do not mandate a common portal.

Tender-tracking estimates suggest that a serious bidder may need to monitor more than 30 portals, each with its own login requirements, search mechanisms and submission deadlines². Even for mid-sized manufacturers and Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) contractors with dedicated business development teams, keeping track of every relevant opportunity can be challenging.

Digital procurement has certainly expanded participation. Micro and small enterprises have won over Rs. 9 lakh crore worth of orders on GeM, accounting for 45.6 per cent of cumulative purchases and exceeding the mandated procurement quota².

An IIT Delhi study covering 101 items between FY 2023–24 and FY 2025–26 found that GeM prices were lower in 74.3 per cent of cases, with savings of 13.6 per cent².

However, greater efficiency within individual platforms does not necessarily solve the challenge of discovering opportunities across the wider procurement ecosystem.

A business cannot compete for a tender it never knew existed.

"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

From tender discovery to competitive advantage

This insight forms the foundation of Tender247's approach.

The company tracks tenders published by government bodies, public sector companies and large private buyers across hundreds of portals, helping businesses identify opportunities that match their capabilities.

But the value of tender intelligence extends well beyond discovering an opportunity.

A significant portion of tendering work happens before a bid is submitted. Businesses must assess eligibility requirements, analyse competitors' previous bids, prepare documentation, coordinate across teams and manage submission deadlines.

Each of these activities influences how effectively a business can compete.

Tender247 brings these functions together through an AI-powered tender management platform. By using AI to identify relevant opportunities, automate documentation and provide teams with a consolidated view of the bidding process, it aims to make tender participation more informed and efficient.

According to the company, its platform can reduce the time required to prepare a bid by approximately 90 per cent. For smaller teams, this could mean the ability to evaluate and pursue more opportunities without a proportionate increase in resources⁴.

"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

What was once largely an advantage enjoyed by bigger organisations, with dedicated teams tracking opportunities and studying competitors, can now become more accessible to businesses of different sizes.

In that sense, Tender247 is working to shift tendering from a largely resource-intensive process to one driven by information, intelligence, and better decision-making.

Anupam Kher joins the story

As Tender247 works to make tender intelligence more accessible, it is also looking to bring greater awareness to a business category that has traditionally remained outside mainstream communication.

The company has announced renowned actor Anupam Kher as its brand ambassador in what it describes as the tender industry's first celebrity association.

The decision signals an interesting shift. A category historically promoted through trade directories, industry networks and direct outreach is now being introduced to a wider business audience through a familiar and widely recognised personality.

Kher's association also reflects the larger idea behind the brand.

Throughout his four-decade career, he has portrayed characters who have had to navigate systems and circumstances that were not always in their favour. Their struggles often stemmed not from a lack of ability, but from limited opportunities or access.

Tender247's proposition rests on a similar understanding: Businesses do not always need greater capabilities to compete. Sometimes, they simply need access to the right information.

"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 opened up in his sector last month, this association has done its work."

— Anupam Kher

For Tender247, the association is therefore more than an exercise in brand visibility. It represents an effort to bring the importance of tender intelligence into mainstream business conversations and encourage more enterprises to explore a market they may not have fully considered.

Making tender intelligence mainstream

Tender247's ambition goes beyond helping businesses discover tenders and manage bids more efficiently.

The company also plans to publish quarterly market intelligence, beginning with a metric rarely highlighted within the industry: The total value of tenders that receive no competing bids.

Such information could offer businesses a clearer understanding of the procurement landscape, including opportunities that may be receiving limited attention.

As India's public procurement economy continues to expand, the ability to discover opportunities, interpret information, and make timely decisions could become an increasingly important competitive advantage.

For Tender247, this is the larger vision: To make tender intelligence more accessible, more actionable and more relevant to businesses across India.

Because in a market of this scale, competitive advantage may no longer depend only on who has the greatest resources, but also on who has access to the right intelligence at the right time.

And with Anupam Kher now lending his voice to this vision, Tender247 is looking to take that message to a much wider business audience.

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