Science, engineering, and lessons learned building markets that work.
A global community of Irish traditional musicians, instrument makers, and cultural organizations generates a fragmented market for cultural services with almost no matching infrastructure. A thin market platform could connect a concertina player in Clare with a cultural festival in Buenos Aires — if someone built the plumbing.
How a specialized thin market platform could match fragmented dual-use technology suppliers with Ukraine's rapidly evolving battlefield requirements.
A junior exploration geologist in a bush camp near Kapuskasing has drill core that tells a compelling copper-gold story. A critical minerals investment fund in Stockholm has a mandate to deploy capital into exactly that kind of project. Neither knows the other exists — because the mining industry's discovery infrastructure runs on conference circuits and personal networks that systematically exclude the geologically excellent but promotionally invisible.
How a MarketForge-powered platform could connect willing industry experts with university instructors across geographical and temporal divides.
Boardy.ai is an AI superconnector that matches founders to investors through voice conversations. Whether its team knows it or not, Boardy has built a working implementation of several core thin market engineering principles. If it can thicken the market for startup capital, the framework works everywhere.
A smallholder farmer in the Rift Valley and a hotel chef in Addis Ababa are 160 kilometres apart. Between them stand five intermediaries, no cold chain, and a system that wastes a third of everything it touches. This is a thin market.
A grain farmer in Saskatchewan grows premium two-row malting barley that the big trading companies blend into commodity shipments. A craft brewery purchasing manager in Cebu wants one container of something special for a seasonal lager. They need each other — but neither knows the other exists.
In rural and northern Ontario, people face legal problems just as complex as anyone in Toronto — but the nearest specialist may be a six-hour drive away. A Law Society portal based on MarketForge could match rural clients to urban specialists and expand access to justice across the province.
We scanned the full economy — every NAICS sector, plus cross-border trade and labour markets — to estimate the value of commerce that doesn't happen because of thin market friction. The answer: $5.7–10.4 trillion globally. This isn't speculation; it's anchored in the academic transaction cost literature and validated sector by sector.
A personal story about a ceramic vase and a Turkish textile became the seed of a question — what if the right collaborators could find each other at scale? A thin market platform built on Cosolvent and KnowledgeSlot sketches the answer, told through the eyes of two Mexican artisans.
An Ethiopian-Canadian professional in Toronto owns a rental property in Addis Ababa that needs $10,000 in upgrades. She can't fly over to manage the work. Her cousins can help, but they can't evaluate a contractor's electrical work or negotiate material prices. This is a thin market — and the trust gap costs more than the renovation.
Open-source Cosolvent handles the heavy lifting of semantic matching and AI-driven onboarding, while deferring domain-specific workflows and trust frameworks to the market sponsors who know their vertical best.
A master timber framer in rural Vermont can't find commissions. A homeowner in Virginia can't find a timber framer. The market between them works by word of mouth — which means it barely works at all. This is a thin market, and the craft is aging out.
Most markets work. Some don't. The difference isn't willpower or capital — it's market physics. Here's why that matters, and what we're building to fix it.
Monolithic frontier LLMs face fundamental barriers to replacing human work: trade secrets, tacit knowledge, sensorimotor expertise, rapidly changing domain knowledge, and the social networks that hold organizations together. A case for distributed AI instead.
Mexico City's Central de Abasto — the largest wholesale market on Earth — feeds 80% of a 22-million-person metropolis through a radically different distribution model than the American supermarket chain. It's also the world's most impressive example of a pre-technology solution to thin market thickening.
In manufacturing, repetition drives excellence. In thin markets, repetition is exactly what's missing. LLM+RAG systems can create a layer of 'digital repetition' — shared memory that enables continuous improvement even when individual participants rarely encounter the same deal twice.
World grain trade is dominated by large trading companies who manage thick markets at both ends of the supply chain. The lost opportunity lies in smaller volumes of specialty premium grains — a market too thin to exist without help.
Western Canadian grain producers can capture 10–40% price premiums by targeting specialty markets through identity-preserved container shipping. A detailed survey of premium opportunities across wheat, barley, pulses, oats, and canola.
Trust is the hardest problem in thin markets. When participants rarely interact and operate across vast distances, how do you build enough confidence for beneficial trades to happen?
How physical clustering — from Istanbul's Gold Street to grain elevator towns — has historically thickened thin markets, and what AI platforms can learn from these ancient patterns.
A comparison of bulk and containerized grain shipping from Western Canada, examining how container shipping enables premium market access for specialty grains despite higher per-unit costs.