Saudi Enterprise AI Startup Gaia Raises $1.5 Million Pre-Seed

Riyadh-based enterprise AI startup Gaia has raised $1.5 million in a Pre-Seed round led by SEEDRA Ventures to develop a sovereign AI platform for large organisations.

Founded by Badr Al-Malluh and Mohammad Rababah, Gaia is building an intelligence layer that connects files, emails, CRM and ERP platforms, and other business systems while keeping data within the organisation’s own environment.

The platform combines enterprise search, generative AI assistants and purpose-built agents. Employees can query connected sources and receive cited answers that link back to the original documents, messages or records, with existing access permissions preserved.

Gaia is also developing agents that can move beyond retrieval to automate recurring tasks such as summaries and reports, as well as execute multi-step workflows across different business applications. Higher-risk actions can be routed to employees for approval before execution.

The company is positioning sovereign deployment and permission-aware access as key parts of its offering, particularly for organisations with stricter requirements around data governance, compliance and accountability.

The funding will support further product development as Gaia works with enterprises on operational use cases across Saudi Arabia’s growing AI and digital transformation market.