JEWN BUG: an AI that reads procurement portals so a small painting crew does not have to

Jewn Enterprises is a Black-owned painting company in West Roxbury, run by Nicole Wiggins, working residential, commercial, and municipal jobs across the Boston area. Public work is where a crew like hers grows, and the opportunities exist. Finding them is the problem: they are scattered across city, state, and federal portals, each with its own format, and reading them all is unpaid, full-time labor that a working owner cannot do.

JEWN BUG was built around a single daily habit: open the app, see what is new, act on it. Overnight it searches the public procurement portals that matter to a painting contractor, parses each listing into plain fields, runs a verification pass so that dead links and stale bids never reach the top, and ranks what is left by fit. Nicole starts her morning with a short list instead of a dozen tabs.

The lab’s Stephen Walter led design, development, and project management. The app is a small, sturdy stack: a web front end on a lightweight API, with a search-grounded commercial model doing the reading and a verification step checking its work, the way The Hope Standard asks. It was co-designed with Nicole, tested in her real routine, and reshaped by what she told us. JEWN BUG is live and in daily production use, and it became one of the first real-world case studies for what grew into Project Lookout.