Our Story
Built by operators who lived bid chaos firsthand and recognized that faster estimating was never going to be enough.
Cadynce did not start with a pitch deck or a product roadmap. It started inside real jobs, real bids, and real frustration. In plan-driven construction and manufacturing, teams generate multiple estimates for multiple contractors, all chasing a single project that only one will ultimately win. Off-the-shelf tools and homegrown solutions never understood this reality. And the chaos they created was impossible to ignore.
What we could not have known then was that AI would come along and make everything faster — and expose every broken process even more.
In 2006, Kenneth Sewell joined Baker Drywall, one of the largest commercial drywall specialty contractors in the United States, as Director of Technology. It was one of the most formative and rewarding roles of his career. Baker was a family business operating in a world driven by architectural plans, tight deadlines, rapid growth, and relentless competition. Every project required precise estimating. Every mistake was expensive.
It was there that Kenneth experienced bid chaos firsthand.
Projects were driven by architectural blueprints and plan-driven estimating workflows. Tracking bids was managed through spreadsheets and email. Status lived in people's heads. Files lived everywhere. Visibility was fragmented, and the cost of mistakes was high. Over time, it became clear this problem was not isolated to Baker. It was systemic across plan-driven construction and manufacturing.
A Pattern That Kept Repeating
In 2011, Kenneth left Baker and joined a mid-sized ERP and business process consulting firm. That is where he met David Dozer.
They became fast friends because they shared the same passion for helping manufacturing companies untangle broken processes. Separately, they traveled across North America working with manufacturers trying to scale using spreadsheets, email, and ERP tools that were never designed for bid-to-build workflows.
Different industries. Different company sizes. The same problems repeated everywhere.
Spreadsheets pretending to be systems. Email threads pretending to be workflows. Teams working hard but flying blind.
Kenneth later moved into sales at HP and other spinoff companies. David continued his career across multiple ERP vendors. They stayed in close contact, often comparing notes and realizing how little had changed inside operations teams.
In 2018, David moved to Texas. The conversations became more frequent. The idea never quite went away.
The Idea That Would Not Let Go
In 2020, during the COVID lockdowns, everything slowed down enough to think clearly.
Manufacturers were still bidding. Still guessing. Still overloaded. Still losing work they should have won.
Kenneth and David kept coming back to a simple question.
*Why is the bid process still this broken?*
They sketched ideas. They debated approaches. They imagined a world where bid work had real visibility, clear ownership, and predictable flow. Not more documents. Not more storage. Actual process clarity.
Then a second question surfaced — one that changed the direction of everything.
*What happens when AI comes for estimating?*
AI tools were already beginning to generate estimates faster than any team could manually produce them. The assumption in the industry was that faster output was the goal. Kenneth and David saw it differently. Speed without structure does not solve the problem. It multiplies it. More estimates, faster, flowing into a process with no visibility, no ownership, and no control — that is not an improvement. That is more chaos arriving sooner.
In 2023, those conversations became a company. Cadynce Software was born.
The Hard Part Nobody Talks About
Starting Cadynce was not clean or easy.
Both founders were working full time in their day jobs. Progress was slow. Development costs added up. Early versions of the software were buggy and incomplete. At one point, the entire database had to be scrapped and rebuilt because the foundation chosen early on was wrong.
There were months where development was paused entirely. The direction felt unclear. Giving up would have been reasonable.
Then something changed.
Cadynce sold its first customer.
Suddenly, the work looked different. Real requirements surfaced. Real urgency appeared. The product had to work, not just sound good. Shortly after, a second customer came on board.
Momentum was still slow, but it was real.
The Decision That Changed Everything
The true inflection point came when Cadynce made a conscious decision to stop trying to be a solution for everyone.
Instead of serving every manufacturer, the focus narrowed to one market with one deeply painful problem.
Truss and building component manufacturers — and the bid process.
This industry lives and dies by bidding construction projects from blueprints. Multiple proposals are created as everyone quotes everything. Win rates are not what anyone hopes for, and only one manufacturer can win. Enormous effort is spent on work that never turns into revenue. And the data from all of it often disappears into file cabinets, shared drives, and forgotten folders.
As one customer put it:
“We have over 15 years of historical bid data just sitting around in file cabinets. We have been waiting for someone to come and help us make sense of it all.”
That statement crystallized everything.
And then the AI wave arrived.
Manufacturers began adopting AI estimating tools. Bids that once took days could be generated in hours. It looked like progress. But the operations teams underneath that speed were not ready. More estimates were flowing in faster than anyone could review, assign, track, or close. The process — already fragile — started breaking under the pressure of its own throughput.
This confirmed what Kenneth and David had suspected for years: the problem was never just speed. It was what happened after the estimate was created. Who owns it. What stage it is in. Whether anyone can see it. Whether the data compounds into something valuable or disappears into a drawer.
Cadynce was not built to make estimating faster. It was built to make sure speed does not come at the cost of control.
What We Believe Today
AI is changing this industry. That is not a prediction — it is already happening.
But faster estimating alone is not a competitive advantage. It is a stress test. Teams that adopt AI without the structure to support it do not get ahead. They get overwhelmed faster.
We believe manufacturers deserve real visibility into their bid process. We believe speed should come from clarity, not heroics. We believe the historical data buried in file cabinets and inboxes is not dead weight — it is the foundation for smarter decisions, better win rates, and a competitive edge that compounds over time.
The manufacturers who will lead this industry are not the ones who adopted AI first. They are the ones who built a process worthy of it.
That is what we are building at Cadynce.
AI is making estimating faster. Most teams are not built for what happens next. Cadynce is.