Built for Small Contractors, by Someone Who Gets It

My name is Richard Faherty. I served in the U.S. Navy as an Electronics Technician on submarines — sonar systems, navigation equipment, the gear that doesn’t get to fail. After the Navy, I went back to school at Columbia University.

During that transition I kept running into the same thing: small contractors and veteran-owned businesses with real skills and real past performance, spending hours a week manually searching SAM.gov, missing opportunities, and losing bids to larger firms that just had more people monitoring the portals. The advantage wasn’t capability — it was tooling.

BidStride is the tool I wanted to exist. It monitors the sources for you, scores what it finds, and puts the right opportunities in front of you every morning. The playing field isn’t level — but the intelligence gap doesn’t have to be this wide.

BidStride is a product of PromptCritical LLC, a venture studio building software tools for underserved markets. PromptCritical is a bootstrapped company — no venture capital, no enterprise sales team, no PR agency. We build things that work and let the results speak.

We take product quality seriously. The tools are used by real contractors pursuing real contracts, and we hear about it when something breaks or a source goes down. That feedback loop is what keeps BidStride honest.