Finding Certified Subs, Compliance Data & Pre-Vetting (with Wissam Akra)

Wissam Akra, founder and CEO of Tough Leaf, joins Luigi La Corte, Andrew Zukoski, and Victor Muchiri (sitting in for Mike Powers) to unpack how general contractors actually find certified subcontractors and prove compliance. Tough Leaf aggregates verified certifications from federal, state, and local agencies alongside qualification data on hundreds of thousands of subs, then plugs into BuildingConnected and Procore preconstruction so primes can match RFPs without rebuilding their workflow. The conversation covers why pre-vetting is different from full prequalification, how AI agents now handle enrichment and matching while phone verification stays human, during-construction compliance tracking, and why a dedicated compliance data layer still beats rebuilding the same dataset inside every procurement tool.