22 years working the public market from the supplier’s side.

We were there when the market went electronic

Chilean public procurement did not appear on a screen all at once. In 1999 it began with an electronic bulletin board. Over the following years, the State gathered its notices into a common system. The 2003 Public Procurement Law created the ChileCompra agency and gave the change an institutional basis. In 2004, electronic contracting moved forward. The name Mercado Público came later, with the new platform of 2007 and 2008.123

For the buying agencies, that transformation organized how their processes were published and handled. For a supplier it raised a different question: among all the calls for bids, how could it know it had seen the opportunities that matched its products? And once found, how could it follow what its team did with each one?

The first answer was to build our own database

In January 2004, Gino Tillemann, founder of Masnet, built an engine in C# that queried the ChileCompra pages, parsed their HTML and turned tenders into structured records. The public API that ChileCompra would add a decade later did not exist yet. The daily capture gradually built a database of its own, with the history of the tenders.45

On that database a desktop application for Windows was born, which let users find opportunities from each company’s catalog, beyond the title or category of the notice. It was built for the desktop because it performed better, made it easier to export data and print, and because in those years clients saw an installed program as a more serious tool than a web application. The software started with a concrete requirement: that a supplier could review the market with the full breadth of its products and work on what it found.5

The project was born under the name Synap and was sold under Usersoft Ltda., the first company its founder created to market it. Masnet was incorporated in 2007 and is today Masnet SpA. The oldest screenshots in the archive are from October 2005 and show Synap version 1.0.64: tenders filtered by business area, the lines of each one with its UN code, and a direct link to chilecompra.cl to submit a quote.512

From finding tenders to commercial intelligence

Finding a tender is only the beginning. Reviewing bids, prices and awards shows what agencies buy, who takes part and what results they get. Masnet brought that analysis into the supplier’s work: in 2005, Synap Report already cross-referenced what had been awarded by agency, supplier and product, and Masnet’s earlier corporate website records an archive of bids and prices from 2009. Today Masnet connects market information with finding opportunities and managing them day to day.512

A search engine that grew into a suite

In 2010 the first version of the Masnet its clients use today was born: Oportunidades de Negocio (business opportunities), a tender search engine built on the company’s own database and each client’s catalog. In the following years came the modules that daily work called for: quotes and requests for information, emails with new tenders, bid openings and awards, purchase order management, bulk data downloads and supervision of each team’s work.5

While ChileCompra expanded its own analysis capacity (the former Analiza.cl, launched in 2009 and strengthened in 2012, the first APIs in 2014 and the open data platform in 2016), Masnet extended the suite around the problems it found among its clients. Tenders, purchase orders and Convenio Marco (framework agreements) sat alongside effectiveness and market reports. Experience in sectors such as pharmaceuticals led to specialized views, and later came tools for Compra Ágil (quick purchases), Convenio Marco management and pricing, CENABAST processes and purchase orders from private clients.56

It is a mature desktop suite, still in use and available by subscription. The screens below are from 2026: the user company appears as Masnet, and clients’ private data is anonymized. The application is in Spanish.13

The new application brings together what used to be separate

In 2026 Masnet brings that experience to a web application built around the tender and the company’s work. The historical index helps find opportunities, and the team can read terms and records, decide whether to take part, organize documents and owners, prepare the bid and submit it with its own Mercado Público session. KIM adds artificial intelligence to query documents and answer with the evidence behind each answer. Guarantees are identified and managed as documents as soon as the process requires them, even while it is open. If there is an award, follow-up can continue to the contract and purchase orders.

The official procedure remains on Mercado Público. Masnet gathers the supplier’s memory, decisions and work around that procedure. The idea began with a tender database and a desktop application. Today it takes the form of a platform that connects public data, commercial operations and documentary evidence.11

The web application is set to replace the desktop suite gradually: both run side by side while the web covers everything clients do in the suite today.