Saudi Arabia-based enterprise AI startup Gaia has raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Seedra Ventures, as businesses across the Kingdom look for ways to adopt artificial intelligence without losing control over their data.
Founded in 2026 by Badr Al-Malluh and Mohammad Rababah, Gaia is building what it describes as a sovereign AI platform for enterprises. The platform connects a company’s files, emails, business systems and workflows into a single layer, allowing employees to search for information, ask questions and automate tasks while keeping organisational data within the company’s environment.
The Problem With Enterprise Information
For large organisations, the challenge with AI often begins long before choosing an AI model. Information is scattered across email inboxes, cloud files, CRM systems, ERP platforms and other business applications, making it difficult for employees to find the right information when they need it.
Gaia is designed to bring these disconnected sources together without forcing organisations to abandon their existing systems. Its platform acts as an operational intelligence layer across an organisation’s existing technology stack, with access controlled according to each employee’s existing permissions.
The company says this fragmentation can result in duplicated work, slower decisions, repetitive manual processes and the loss of institutional knowledge when employees leave.
From Search to AI-Powered Action
Gaia’s platform is built around three core capabilities: Enterprise Search, an AI Assistant and AI Agents.
Enterprise Search allows employees to search across connected company systems and receive answers that point back to the specific file, email, thread or record where the information originated. The AI Assistant takes this further by generating responses based on the organisation’s own information, while retaining links to the underlying sources.
The third layer is where Gaia aims to move beyond traditional workplace search.
Its AI Agents can perform tasks across connected applications rather than simply answering questions. They can automate recurring work such as generating reports and summaries and coordinate workflows across different systems, with sensitive or high-risk actions routed to humans for approval.
Security at the Centre
Data security is central to Gaia’s proposition. The company is positioning itself as a sovereign AI platform, designed so organisational data remains within the enterprise environment rather than being sent elsewhere.
Permission awareness is another key component. An employee can only retrieve information they are already authorised to access, meaning connecting more systems does not automatically give everyone access to everything.
For enterprises considering AI adoption, this combination of data control, permission-aware search and human oversight could be particularly important as organisations begin moving AI from experimentation into everyday operations.
Building for Saudi Enterprises
Gaia was founded by Badr Al-Malluh, who serves as Co-Founder and CEO, and Mohammad Rababah, Co-Founder and CPTO.
The startup is entering a Saudi market where organisations across sectors are investing heavily in digital transformation and AI. Rather than positioning its technology as a general-purpose consumer AI product, Gaia is focused specifically on the operational challenges faced by enterprises.
The company intends to use the new funding to continue developing its platform and work directly with Saudi enterprises as they identify practical applications for AI across their operations.
The Next Enterprise AI Layer
The investment from Seedra Ventures gives Gaia early capital to develop its technology and establish relationships with enterprise customers.
Its ambition extends beyond building another workplace chatbot. Gaia wants to become the layer through which employees can find what their organisation knows, understand it and ultimately act on it.
That shift—from AI that answers questions to AI that can securely take action—is likely to become one of the defining battlegrounds in enterprise software. For Gaia, the opportunity is to build that infrastructure from Saudi Arabia, with data sovereignty and enterprise control embedded into the product from the beginning.
