Executive Summary

Small and mid-sized firms that respond to requests for proposals spend disproportionate time on first-pass triage—reading long PDFs, extracting requirements and obligations, and deciding whether to pursue a bid—which often consumes an estimated 30–50% of the total response cycle for teams without dedicated proposal staff. This problem affects roughly 2 million SMBs globally that actively respond to RFPs and leaves valuable opportunities missed or evaluated too slowly, especially for teams where proposal work is an add-on to billable client work. You could build an AI-first extraction and checklist workflow that ingests PDFs or portal exports, extracts requirements, obligations, pricing terms and deadlines, auto-populates a standardized bid/no-bid checklist, and presents a one-page risk/reward score with human-in-the-loop editing and provenance for every extracted clause. The product should integrate with CRM/proposal systems, produce a 1–2 minute summary per RFP, and target reducing first-pass triage time by roughly 2–4x in early pilots while offering an accuracy target (e.g., >90% precision on key obligations) and clear revision controls. The market is attractive now because the addressable opportunity is about $6.0B (2M businesses × $3K ACV) and three macro trends align: LLM-driven NLP improvements that make clause extraction reliable enough for triage, increasing procurement digitization and standardized RFP formats that simplify automation, and margin pressure on SMBs that forces efficiency in bid workflows. Independent scores reflect this: market score 90/100 and revenue potential 85/100, indicating strong demand if you can deliver reliable, auditable outputs at an accessible price point. To stand out you will need to prioritize extraction precision, explainability, and low-friction integration rather than generic chatty LLM outputs—differentiate with domain-tuned models, obligation-level provenance, audit trails for compliance, and templated checklists tailored to industry risk profiles. Be honest about challenges: achieving and maintaining >90% precision requires labeled training data and ongoing monitoring, legal teams will demand verifiable provenance, and competition is medium so go-to-market execution and partnership channels (proposal tools and procurement platforms) will determine whether this becomes a defensible product.

Market Opportunity

Faster first-pass RFP reviews — AI extract + checklist workflow targets a $6.0B = 2M businesses x $3K ACV (global small/mid firms that respond to RFPs buying proposal/RFP tooling) total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 12-20% annually (procurement digitization + SaaS adoption in SMBs).

Key trends driving demand: LLM-driven automation -- advances in NLP make extracting requirements and obligations from long PDFs reliable enough for first-pass triage.; Procurement digitization -- more RFPs are issued through portals and standardized formats, easing automation.; SMB margin pressure -- smaller firms must win more bids efficiently, driving demand for time-saving tools.; Integrations-first workflows -- buyers expect tools that plug into CRM, document stores, and e-signature platforms..

Key competitors include RFPIO, Loopio, RFP360, Proposify / PandaDoc (adjacent), Workarounds: MS Word/Excel + Google Drive + CRMs.

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Faster first-pass RFP reviews — AI extract + checklist workflow

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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