Riyadh-based enterprise AI startup Gaia has raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed round led by SEEDRA Ventures, marking the company’s first disclosed financing.
Founded by CEO Badr Al-Malluh and CPTO Mohammad Rababah, Gaia is developing a sovereign AI platform designed to connect an organisation’s internal files, emails, CRM, ERP platforms and other business systems through a single intelligence layer.
The platform combines enterprise search, generative AI assistants and AI agents, enabling employees to search across connected data sources, generate answers grounded in company information and automate tasks across different business applications.
A key focus for Gaia is enabling enterprises to use AI while maintaining control over their data. The platform preserves existing employee access permissions and can be deployed in a private cloud, on-premise or fully offline environment, with data stored and processed within Saudi Arabia.
“Enterprise knowledge is often fragmented across systems, emails, documents, and teams,” said Badr Al-Malluh. Gaia aims to turn this information into actionable intelligence while helping companies automate work without their data leaving the organisation.
Beyond information retrieval, Gaia is developing AI agents capable of handling recurring tasks such as summaries and reports and executing 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, permission-aware access, data governance and compliance as key elements of its offering, particularly for Saudi organisations with strict requirements around data security and accountability. Arabic-language requirements are also among the areas the company is addressing.
Gaia has joined Nvidia’s Inception startup programme and is already working with enterprises on operational use cases.
Al-Malluh previously co-founded Saudi influencer marketing platform KLIQ, while Rababah previously held a product leadership role at Saudi AI insurtech DESAISIV.
For SEEDRA Ventures, the investment adds Gaia to a portfolio that includes companies such as Tamara, Zid, Lendo, Lucidya, ZenHR and Omniful. The Saudi investor backs startups from pre-seed through later early-stage rounds.
Gaia said the new funding will be used to further develop its platform as the company works with enterprises across Saudi Arabia’s growing AI and digital transformation market.
