Sam McCord

I started McCord because the equipment that decides whether a project lands on time is the equipment nobody lists. A turbine, an exchange core, a transformer, a critical spare. When the date is already at risk, a buyer is handed a chain of intermediaries, none of whom control the asset, all of whom sit in the price and the timeline. I wanted the opposite of that: one desk, on the buyer’s side, going direct to the party that holds the unit.

I have worked in industrial AI since before the market had a name for it. The first problem was suspended and idle oil and gas facilities, where the only questions that mattered were what plant was still standing and what condition it was in. Satellite imagery answered part of it. The rest we built ourselves and keep sharpening: machine-assisted workflows for finding equipment that appears on no list and no register. Those workflows are now pointed at the power and industrial market. The same approach sits behind a mining procurement venture I built and have kept on hold, because the demand here is more than enough to work.

The software narrows the field. People who have specified, inspected and moved this plant decide what is real. Neither half is useful without the other.

The experience behind that is commercial, not theoretical. I built the North American region for a commercial fit-out manufacturer out of Toronto, selling to institutional developers including Hines, Ivanhoé Cambridge and QuadReal on projects such as CIBC Square and Hudson Yards, running tenders and supply against offshore manufacturing. Across four early-stage technology and manufacturing companies I ran go-to-market, and co-founded a consumer brand that earned a Sobeys listing. I have opened new geographies for established Canadian manufacturers, among them ergoCentric, where the buyers were energy companies including Canadian Natural Resources and Enbridge.

A word on the name. I came to this as a natural resources investor and turned into an operator, which is the half that stuck. The sign still says Investments and nobody has complained yet, so it stays.

The thread through all of it is the same. Procurement rarely fails on price. It fails on availability, against a date. That is the problem McCord exists to solve, and we move on speed and execution.