About gapXplorer

Learn how we combine advanced analytics, human insight, and Nordic grit to help entrepreneurs master a sea of opportunities.

Dreki I — Our bespoke Machine Learning model

Inspired by the Vikings’ dreki longships, Dreki I is the engine that powers every gapXplorer report — a model built to sail through vast, uncharted markets and uncover opportunities with clarity and confidence.

With dragon heads carved into their prows, the Vikings’ dreki (Old Norse for “dragon”) longships cut across oceans with speed, endurance, and fearless resolve. Inspired by these legendary vessels, Dreki I is our bespoke machine learning model, designed to guide you across uncharted markets so you will master the sea of business opportunities.

Dreki I also performs its own internal validation of every opportunity it uncovers. Each prediction is subjected to a sequence of mathematical, statistical, and physics-inspired consistency checks, filtering out noise and highlighting only the most robust market signals.

Hans Gude — Viking Ship in the Sognefjord (1889)
Hans Gude, Viking Ship in the Sognefjord (1889). Source: Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

How do we know gapXplorer's Opportunity Index works?

We designed it to measure how supportive a location is for a business type, then sanity-checked it with strict validation techniques used in financial risk modelling.

Lift vs population monitored — Opportunity Index validation
Lift vs population monitored. Values above 1 mean closures concentrate more than random in the lowest-score locations. As of launch date, 2026-01-01. Total sample size = 2,000 small businesses in the Stockholm metro area. 6-months default rate approx. 4%.

In one minute

We built the Opportunity Index as a business thriving indicator, combining quantitative rigour with real risk and business experience. It is not a “probability of failure” score. Instead, it measures whether a location’s underlying environment is structurally supportive or structurally challenging.

Here’s the key idea: if we can reliably identify the consistently low-performing places, then we also know that higher-scoring areas are, on average, statistically better places to operate. That is exactly what we see in the data.

What this means for you

We are not claiming to predict the fate of any single business. We are giving you a statistically grounded map of where the environment is more supportive for your business type, so your search starts from a stronger baseline.

To sanity-check this, we used strict evaluation techniques borrowed from quant departments at banks and capital markets (where the founders have more than 20 years of combined experience): out-of-sample testing, stability checks, and tail-risk concentration analysis.

The chart on the left summarises the result. If closures were random, monitoring the worst 10% of locations would capture about 10% of closures. Instead, closures concentrate in the lowest-scoring areas: monitoring the worst 10% captures roughly 22% of closures, and the worst areas have around 2.5× higher closure risk. That strong “lower-tail” signal is the consistency check we want to pass.

Our Team

gapXplorer is built by operators who have led risk, strategy, and analytics programs on both sides of the Atlantic.

Founder & Chief Exploration Officer

Adrián Sánchez-Reyes Febrián

Adrián is a Barcelona-born quantitative finance and AI leader with a degree in Fundamental Physics (Universitat de Barcelona) and an MSc in Finance (Universitat Pompeu Fabra). After a decade as a quant in risk modelling teams at Moody’s Analytics, Nordea, and Nasdaq, he founded gapXplorer to give entrepreneurs mathematically grounded clarity on where to grow next.

Outside the office he created Sapere Aude – Dare to Know, teaches the history of ideas, and writes on religion and aesthetics—proof that curiosity and disciplined analysis guide everything we build.

Co-founder, CFO & Chief Strategist

Rahelah Syed

Rahelah pairs a Master’s in Management of Financial Products with Six Sigma, PMP, PMI-PBA, and COSO ERM credentials. She launched structured-finance operations at Société Générale, advised organizations through her own consultancy, and now shapes Nasdaq’s global risk transformation programs.

At gapXplorer she turns complex market intelligence into actionable strategy, ensuring every insight, rollout, and partnership is grounded in rigorous governance and a deep commitment to inclusive leadership.