About Publicus
We are building the software government deserves, starting with the procurement data it already has.
Portraits of the two founders, Joe Noss, co-founder and CEO, and Akash Shetty, co-founder and CTO.
Government procurement data is public by law but trapped in practice. Thousands of contracts, tenders, and awards are scattered across portals, buried in PDFs, and locked inside systems that were never meant to support usable market intelligence.
Decades of digital transformation projects tried to fix this. Massive ERP implementations. Multi-year modernization programs. But this is no one's fault specifically: government tech debt is serious, change management is difficult, and data transformation and engineering are expensive. Even after major investment, the data often stayed trapped.
Most procurement decisions on both sides are made too late. Businesses find out about a renewal when the RFP drops, and buyers find out a contract is over budget when the invoices pile up. Publicus changes the timing. We collect and clean procurement data from hundreds of sources and use AI to read every contract, award, amendment, and opportunity in context, without replacing the systems governments already have.
Publicus is an AI platform for government procurement, founded in 2024 by a former Deloitte government consultant and a machine learning engineer. We give businesses the market intelligence to win public contracts, and give governments early warning and control over what they buy.
Why procurement
Publicus wasn't adapted for government. It was built for government from day one. Every AI model, every data pipeline, every product decision starts with the same question: does this make government procurement teams and the businesses that support them more effective?
We started with procurement because it touches every department, involves enormous sums of public money, and the data needed to make better decisions already exists. It's just never been brought together. But procurement is the beginning, not the end. The same approach that frees procurement data can free all government data: contracts, permits, case files, policy documents, service records. Our long-term mission is to give civil servants the tools and data access they need to build their own solutions, on their own terms, without waiting years for the next platform transformation.
The team
Joe comes from the government and public-sector side. Akash comes from the AI and product side. Publicus exists because both perspectives are needed to build software that actually works here.
Co-founder and CEO
I have worked at the intersection of tech, government, policy, and data all my life. I am obsessed with making government work for people, and am always interested in chatting more with those who feel the same.
Co-founder and CTO
Built the platform architecture, data pipelines, and AI models that process millions of procurement records across hundreds of government sources from the ground up.
Origin
We met at a coding boot camp and started talking about the gap between what government technology could be and what it actually is. Joe had seen it from the inside at Deloitte: transformation projects that took years and cost millions, while the people doing the work were still stuck with fragmented data, brittle workflows, and systems layered on top of systems from decades ago. Akash had built products at Loblaw Digital that served millions of users and knew what modern, well-built software looked like.
The thesis was simple: the reason government technology is so hard to modernize is rarely a lack of effort or talent. It is data. Data locked in 1980s-era systems. Data spread across PDFs, exports, forms, and legacy databases. Data shaped by years of tech debt, policy constraints, and incremental change. AI finally changes that equation. It can structure the unstructured, connect records across disconnected systems, and turn messy operational data into something usable for entirely new products and workflows.
We started with procurement because it's the clearest proof point. Public data, obvious pain, measurable value. If we can make procurement intelligence dramatically better and dramatically cheaper, we can do the same for other categories of government data. The long-term goal is bigger than one workflow: give governments the ability to build on top of their own data, move faster, and shape their own future instead of waiting for the next massive transformation program.
We believe government deserves 10x better software at 10x lower cost. The technology to deliver that finally exists. That's our mission, and that's what we're building toward.
2024
Joe Noss and Akash Shetty start Publicus to set government procurement data free.
Qualified
Any federal department can work with us by issuing a scope of work.
Listed
A qualified provider of AI services to the Government of Canada.
Engaged
Analytics on Canadian vendor ownership for the federal government.
Today
From solo consultants to enterprises and government teams.
Government credentials
Qualified through Innovative Solutions Canada, which means any federal department can work with us by issuing a scope of work to use our innovation for data processing.
We've worked with Public Services and Procurement Canada to provide analytics on Canadian vendor ownership.
Listed on the Government of Canada AI Source List as a qualified provider of Artificial Intelligence Services. If you want to work with us for a project, this is a pathway.
$300B
Canadian public procurement a year, in one place
100,000+
Vendors analysed
100+
Organizations using Publicus, as of October 2026
4,340+
Public buyers included in the data
FAQ
Can't find what you're looking for? Reach out at joe@publicus.ai
Two audiences. Businesses that sell to government, who want to know what is renewing, who is winning, and what buyers pay; and government teams, who want early warning on contracts at risk, savings, and true vendor ownership.
Yes. Publicus is Canadian-founded and Canadian-operated, with Canadian cloud infrastructure. We are part of Innovative Solutions Canada and listed on the AI Source List.
Procurement is the clearest proof point: public data, obvious pain, and measurable value. If we can make procurement intelligence dramatically better and dramatically cheaper, the same approach can apply to many other categories of government data.
Consulting can answer a question once. Publicus is software that keeps the intelligence current. The goal is not a one-time report, but a durable layer that governments and businesses can keep using as the market changes.
More than 100 organizations use Publicus today, from solo consultants to enterprises like Calian, Dexterra, and Visa, and government teams. The platform has analysed more than 100,000 vendors across 4,340+ public buyers.
To give governments the tools and data access they need to build their own solutions on top of the systems and records they already have, without waiting years for the next platform transformation.
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