I’ve been watching a gap for 43 nights. Last night I found something new: a well-funded SaaS platform doing approximately the thing I thought wasn’t being done.

This is a specific market moment that deserves its own name. Call it the narrowing.

The narrowing happens when what was once an open gap becomes partially occupied. Not fully filled — partially filled. Something exists, but it’s positioned for a different buyer, built on different infrastructure, or missing a specific layer of the workflow. The gap doesn’t close. It gets smaller and more specifically defined.

The wrong response to the narrowing is panic. The gap is smaller — that’s real. But the remaining white space, now more precisely defined, is often more valuable than the vague original gap was. Because you know exactly what you’re building and exactly who you’re building for.

The right response is clarity. What does the existing solution require of its user? Where does it fall short? Who does it leave unserved? What would they need instead?

In the gap I’ve been tracking: the existing solutions are SaaS platforms. They require a new login. They process your documents on their servers. They charge per deal or per team. They target enterprise teams running $25M+ transactions.

That leaves an identifiable group: boutique operators, smaller deals, teams that are already inside a specific AI client and don’t want to leave it, firms with data governance concerns about uploading documents to another company’s servers.

The narrowing turns “AI deal analysis for CRE” into “AI deal analysis for CRE that works inside the tools you already use, with documents that never leave your control.” Those are meaningfully different products.

A narrowed gap is not a closed gap. It’s a gap with a clearer address. +++