Saudi Arabia-based enterprise artificial intelligence startup Gaia has raised $1.5 million in a pre-Seed funding round led by Seedra Ventures as it develops an AI platform designed to help businesses securely manage organisational knowledge and automate work.
Founded in 2026 by Badr Al-Malluh and Mohammad Rababah, Gaia is building what it describes as a sovereign AI platform that connects enterprise knowledge, files, emails, business systems and workflows while keeping organisational data within the company’s environment.
The platform combines enterprise search, a generative AI assistant and AI agents to help employees find information, obtain answers grounded in company data and automate tasks across connected applications.
According to co-founder and CEO Badr Al-Malluh, “Gaia transforms that knowledge into actionable intelligence”.
This enables enterprises to improve productivity and decision-making without compromising control over sensitive data.
Gaia Targets Fragmented Enterprise Information
Modern businesses often store critical information across multiple disconnected platforms, making it difficult for employees to quickly locate the knowledge required to perform their jobs.
Emails may contain important decisions, documents may sit in shared drives, customer information may exist inside CRM systems, while financial and operational records are stored in enterprise resource planning platforms.
Gaia is designed to connect these separate sources into a single intelligence layer, allowing authorised employees to search across them without manually moving between applications.
The company says industry research shows that 60% of employees cannot find the information they need within their organisations, while 30% of their working time can be lost gathering context.
This fragmentation can contribute to duplicated work, slower decisions, compliance challenges and the loss of institutional knowledge when experienced employees leave.
Enterprise Search and AI Assistant Bring Company Knowledge Together
Gaia’s platform combines enterprise search with a generative AI assistant capable of producing responses based on an organisation’s own information.
Rather than providing generic answers, the system searches connected business systems and returns information grounded in the company’s knowledge base.
A major feature is its ability to provide citations or links to the original sources, allowing employees to verify where an answer originated.
The platform is also designed to respect existing access permissions, meaning an employee should not receive information through the AI that they would not ordinarily be authorised to access.
This permission-aware approach is particularly important for companies handling confidential commercial, financial, customer or employee information.
Gaia says its Enterprise Search can provide cited answers across connected systems, while its AI Assistant can deliver responses grounded in organisational knowledge with links to the underlying sources.
AI Agents Move Gaia Beyond Simple Chatbots
Beyond searching for information and answering questions, Gaia is developing AI agents capable of performing tasks across business applications.
This distinction is significant because traditional AI assistants generally respond to prompts, while AI agents can be designed to execute multi-step workflows.
Gaia says its purpose-built agents can automate recurring activities such as preparing summaries and reports and can operate across connected applications.
For example, an organisation could potentially use an agent to gather information from different systems, prepare a report and initiate a workflow rather than requiring an employee to complete every step manually.
However, Gaia says high-risk actions can be routed to humans for approval before execution. This creates a human-in-the-loop model in which AI handles routine operational work while people retain control over decisions and actions that require greater oversight.
Data Security at the Centre of Gaia’s Enterprise Strategy
Security is central to Gaia’s proposition because many organisations remain cautious about giving artificial intelligence access to sensitive internal information.
The company says 70% of leaders of large enterprises identify data security as a barrier to AI adoption, highlighting a major challenge facing businesses seeking to integrate generative AI into their operations.
Gaia’s response is its sovereign AI model, which is designed to keep organisational data within the enterprise environment rather than requiring sensitive information to leave the organisation.
Its permission-aware architecture is also intended to ensure that employees only receive information they are authorised to access.
“Data never leaves the organisation,” Gaia says in describing its platform.
For sectors such as financial services, healthcare, government and other highly regulated industries, this combination of AI capability, access control and data sovereignty could become an important factor in enterprise technology adoption.
Funding to Support Saudi Enterprise Expansion
The $1.5 million pre-Seed investment gives Gaia capital to continue developing its technology while working directly with Saudi enterprises seeking to introduce AI into their operations.
The company was founded by Badr Al-Malluh, who serves as co-founder and CEO, and Mohammad Rababah, who serves as co-founder and CPTO.
The startup’s strategy comes as Saudi Arabia accelerates digital transformation under Vision 2030, creating growing demand for technologies capable of improving productivity while maintaining strong control over data.
Gaia intends to work with enterprises to identify practical operational challenges where AI can deliver measurable value rather than simply introducing AI as a standalone tool.
“Enterprise knowledge is often fragmented across systems, emails, documents, and teams,” Al-Malluh said.
He added that this limits how effectively organisations operate. With its latest funding, Gaia is positioning its platform as a secure foundation through which Saudi businesses can search, understand and act on their organisational knowledge.
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