UK public sector procurement was fragmented and opaque
Tussell is the authoritative data source for UK public sector procurement. Public contracts represent roughly 10% of national GDP — over £200 billion annually — but the data sat in silos, unformatted and difficult to analyse.
In 2016, Tussell engaged Pixie Labs to turn that fragmented data into a scalable, self-service analytics platform. What began as a manual reporting process has grown into a market intelligence tool trusted by suppliers, government bodies, and financial institutions alike.
They needed a scalable data platform
Tussell had validated demand with a proof-of-concept product and a growing client base — but manual report generation was a bottleneck that couldn't scale.
Pixie Labs built a robust customer-facing platform from scratch, integrated with improved data infrastructure, enabling Tussell to serve more clients with less operational overhead.
We helped Tussell achieve…
01.
50% user growth
Tussell achieved 50% year-on-year user growth, driven by a self-service platform that scaled without proportional increases in operational cost.
02.
95%+ retention rate
A 95%+ year-on-year retention rate reflects the platform's reliability and the depth of insight it delivers to customers across private and public sectors.
03.
1,000+ press citations
Since 2018, Tussell has been cited over 1,000 times in publications including The Economist, Financial Times, and The Guardian as the go-to source for procurement intelligence.
Using our Vital Systems™ process to drive progress
Diagnosing issues
We worked closely with Tussell's leadership, product, and customer success teams to understand business objectives, map pain points, and validate technical and usability assumptions. Examining existing reports and generation workflows gave us a clear picture of where scale was being lost.
Planning priorities
We architected a solution and created a prioritised feature backlog with a detailed delivery roadmap. Defined milestones covered self-service accounts, data range selection, interactive views, customisable downloads, and email notifications — sequenced for maximum early value.
Rebuilding systems
We began by improving Tussell's existing data infrastructure for reliability and data quality, then built the customer-facing platform from scratch on top of it. Testing for data quality, performance, and usability ran throughout, with improvements fed in continuously from early feedback.
Priming for growth
The platform evolved through incremental and transformative improvements: ClickHouse for high-performance analytics, advanced multi-filter search, interactive dashboards, saved searches with digest alerts, buyer and supplier profiles, and an Opportunity Analyser powering bid/no-bid intelligence.
The result is the authoritative source on UK public sector contracts — a platform that maps, enhances, and aggregates raw data from 1,000+ sources, connecting 800,000+ tenders, frameworks, and awarded contracts. It analyses the complete procurement journey from pre-market engagement through £5 trillion in invoices, giving private sector suppliers and government bodies the data-led intelligence to act.
01
Ruby on Rails for backend API and data pipeline orchestration.
02
React for interactive dashboards and self-service data views.
03
ClickHouse for high-performance analytics queries on large datasets.
04
PostgreSQL for relational data storage and customer accounts.
05
Heroku for high erosion resistance and long-term stability with a lean engineering team.
06
Sidekiq for background data ingestion, processing, and email notifications.
If you want to work with somebody who will be invested in the success of your product and ask questions about why you want to build a certain feature and what problems you are trying to solve, then Pixie Labs is the right technology partner for you
Joe Creedon,
Head of Product, Tussell