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Saudi enterprise AI startup Gaia has raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Riyadh-based SEEDRA Ventures, its first disclosed financing.
Founded by CEO Badr Al-Malluh and CPTO Mohammad Rababah, Gaia connects a company’s internal files, emails and business systems into a single AI layer, allowing employees to search across them, generate answers grounded in company data and hand tasks across different applications to AI agents.
The emphasis is less on building another general-purpose model than making existing enterprise data usable by AI without moving it outside an organisation’s security perimeter. Gaia inherits employees’ existing access permissions and can be deployed in a company’s private cloud, on-premise or fully offline, with data stored and processed inside Saudi.
“Enterprise knowledge is often fragmented across systems, emails, documents, and teams,” Al-Malluh said. Gaia, he added, is intended to turn that information into “actionable intelligence” while allowing companies to automate work without their data leaving the organisation.
Al-Malluh previously co-founded Saudi influencer marketing platform KLIQ, which raised a $2.25 million seed round led by Sanabil Venture Studio last year, before leaving to build Gaia. Rababah came from Saudi AI insurtech DESAISIV, where he worked in product leadership before announcing his move to Gaia earlier this summer.
Gaia has since joined Nvidia’s Inception startup programme and is positioning the product specifically around the data residency, compliance and Arabic-language requirements of Saudi enterprises.
Lead investor SEEDRA is one of Saudi Arabia’s more active early-stage investors, with a portfolio that includes Tamara, Zid, Lendo, Lucidya, ZenHR and Omniful. It invests from pre-seed through later early-stage rounds.
Gaia said it is already working with enterprises on operational use cases, and that the funding will support continued development of the platform.
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