Project Lookout is live, and BECMA is its first network

On October 6, the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts filled the Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport for the 2026 Mass Black Expo. The theme was on every screen in the building: Building Black Wealth: Small Business, Big Impact. General admission sold out four days early. Fifty Black-owned businesses from across the Commonwealth ran the pavilion floor. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, Mayor Michelle Wu, and Senator Ed Markey all attended.

And on the main stage, Rev. Christopher Hope and I got to say something out loud that we had been building toward for a long time. Project Lookout is live, and it has its first network. The Black Economic Council of Massachusetts now runs its own instance of the platform for its members.

It is called BECMA Compass.

What we said on stage

We opened with two numbers. Over five years, the City of Boston spent $2.1 billion on contracts. 1.2 percent of it reached Black- and Latino-owned businesses. Those figures come from the city’s own disparity study, as The Boston Globe reported in February 2021.

There are many reasons for a gap that wide. The one we set out to close is the simplest. You cannot win what you never saw.

Public money in Massachusetts goes out through more than a hundred portals, each with its own login, its own search box, and its own vocabulary. A large firm pays a business-development team to watch all of them. A small business cannot. So the opportunity is posted, the deadline passes, and the business that could have done the work never knew it existed.

Chris made that case. Then I opened BECMA Compass on the big screen and ran it live, down to asking the assistant a real question: which of my saved leads is due soonest? The pitch fits in a sentence. It learns a member’s business, does the searching overnight, shows its work on every match, and starts the first draft when a member decides to go after one.

Why the first network matters

We built Lookout to be run by networks, not sold seat by seat. A chamber, a council, or a foundation gets its own instance, with its own name, its own members, and its own reporting. The members sign in to something that belongs to an organization they already trust. Their data stays the network’s.

BECMA is the right first network, because BECMA members helped shape the product. It was designed with them, tested inside their businesses, and changed by what they told us. So the name on the screen that morning was BECMA’s, with “powered by Project Lookout” in the small print underneath. That is the right order.

It is also free for BECMA members. Lookout sweeps every source once a night into one shared, verified pool, then matches that pool against every member. The cost grows with the number of sources, not the number of members. That is what lets a whole network use it without anyone paying per seat.

The first month

BECMA Compass has now been running for one month, with its first ten member businesses. The platform is in beta. Here is what it has done so far.

• 29,973 opportunity matches put in front of members, each one scored against that member’s real business profile.
• 2,503 distinct grants, contracts, and bids behind those matches.
• $9.2 billion in stated value across the opportunities surfaced.
• $14.4 million in stated contract value in members’ open pipelines, meaning opportunities they have saved or bid on.
• 2,517 matches that carried a supplier-diversity set-aside.
• 265 cities, towns, and places reached.

A note on how to read these. They are platform-tracked figures from a beta, plus outcomes members reported themselves. Dollar values are what the postings state, not awards. The number we care about most is contracts won, and public procurement moves slower than a month. When those wins arrive, we will report them here.

What a month can show is whether the looking works. Ten businesses now start each morning with a ranked list of real opportunities, every link checked, every match explained. A month ago, that list did not exist.

Thank you

To the team at BECMA, for the stage, for the partnership, and for trusting us with their members. To Nicole Obi, for leading BECMA’s bold vision. To Mackenson Charles and Abdullateef Lawal for stewarding the project with care and ingenuity. To Nicole Wiggins of Jewn Enterprises, whose collaboration with us inspired the idea. To Yunzi Wan, who quality tested it. And to the BECMA members who told us, plainly, what was wrong with the early versions.

What comes next

If you are a BECMA member, Compass is yours. Sign in at projectlookout.app.

If you lead a chamber, a council, a foundation, or any network of small businesses or nonprofits, Lookout was built so that your organization can be next, under your own name. Talk to us about bringing it to your community, or read how the platform works.

The highlight reel and the photos from the day are below.