I started SICAP.ai in 2020 to answer a simple question: where does the Romanian government spend public money?

I built a scraper to pull data from the government’s procurement portal and indexed it all in Elasticsearch. Five years later, over 100k people use it every month — investigative journalists chasing stories, businesses scouting opportunities, and citizens tracking public spending. It grew entirely through SEO and word of mouth.

The hard parts: managing an Elasticsearch cluster on Docker Swarm, making sense of poorly documented government data, and working around an unreliable source portal that needs constant retry logic.

The long-term goal is training a model on this data to predict tender outcomes and flag potential fraud.

All code for the scraper and the website is open source on GitHub.

A spin-off from this project is SICAP PNRR — an evidence.dev app visualising Romania’s recovery and resilience plan spending.

After years of running SICAP.ai, I saw a gap: businesses needed more than search — they needed workflow tools to actually win tenders. I partnered with a domain expert in public procurement and we built SICAP.pro.

We index SEAP notices and deliver precision tools — advanced filters, CPV-based search, personalised alerts, and a clean tender inbox — so teams spot the right opportunities faster. The focus is on reducing noise and surfacing what matters.

Built in partnership with James Cropper’s Creative Minds franchise. Artists could both book existing art events and publish their own for others to attend.

The project didn’t survive. A few honest takeaways:

• Two-sided marketplaces are brutally hard to bootstrap — cold start on both sides.
• Launching during a pandemic meant our target audience (in-person event goers) wasn’t going anywhere.
• We didn’t understand the market deeply enough before building.