Pre-seed · 2026

Use AI.Keep the data.

NeuroWard is a box in your rack that decides what your AI traffic may carry. Mask it, block it, or just log it.

All 3 modes tested3 enterprise briefings · agency demo 1 NovShips as a hardware applianceCompany to be formed in your jurisdiction

The problem

Every prompt is a data transfer.

“Write a refund email to layla@example.com. She says card 4111 1111 1111 1111 was charged twice. Refund to TR330006100519786457841326.”

Sample prompt · synthetic data · sent to a server abroad

Staff paste real data into AI tools every day: IDs, IBANs, cards, customer emails, API keys.
Security can't see it. No record of which app sent what, to which model.
The choices are bad: ban AI and lose productivity, or rewrite every app and still not audit it.

of AI-related data breaches will come from cross-border misuse of generative AI by 2027. (Gartner)

of organisations that reported an AI-related breach lacked proper AI access controls. (IBM, 2025)

of breached organisations had no AI governance policy or way to detect shadow AI. (IBM, 2025)

Sources: Gartner press release, 17 Feb 2025; IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 Full list on the last slide.

Why the Gulf, why now

Strict data laws.AI spend more than doubling.

UAE

Federal PDPL

Decree-Law 45/2021. Cross-border transfer conditions, plus DIFC and ADGM regimes and central-bank localisation rules.

Regulator rules still rolling out

KSA

PDPL + SDAIA

Transfers abroad only under set conditions. SDAIA issued transfer regulations and standard contract clauses in 2024.

Fines up to SAR 5M

QATAR

Law No. 13 of 2016

Personal data protection with safeguards required for transfers to countries without adequate protection.

Fines up to QAR 5M

BAHRAIN

Law No. 30 of 2018

Transfers only to adequate jurisdictions, or with approved contract terms or consent.

Fines from BHD 20,000

Saudi enterprise AI spend in a year

The UAE grew 105%. Staff already use AI at work, so banning it rarely holds.

1 prompt

can be a cross-border transfer

Personal data sent to a foreign AI provider counts as a transfer. Most companies have no record of what was sent. NeuroWard stops the data and logs the decision.

SAR 5M

top fine under the Saudi PDPL

Prison is possible for intentional disclosure of sensitive data. When the auditor asks, the CISO needs a per-request log to show.

Penalty figures per law-firm and advisory summaries. Spend data: ServiceNow AI maturity index (2026) as reported by Middle East AI News. NeuroWard supports compliance work; it does not claim compliance.

The solution

Three ways in.Nothing sensitive leaves.

Same box and same rules in every mode.

Inside your network

Your apps & staffPoint the SDK's base URL at the appliance

NeuroWard appliance · on-prem

Detect → Decide → ActMask, block or log, rule by rule. Every decision is recorded without storing the value.

Outside

AI providerSees <<IBAN_1>>, never the real value. Or nothing, if the rule blocks.

Reach the appliance by URL, DNS or network redirect.

Detect IDs, IBANs, cards, emails, keys and your own terms.

Decide per rule: mask it, block it, or just log it. Blocked requests never leave.

Restore real values in masked replies, even while they stream.

Inline opens only named AI providers and passes all other traffic through untouched. DNS and inline use a name-constrained certificate authority signed by your own CA; its key never leaves the box. Clients that pin certificates are not supported in DNS mode.

How it ships

A box in your rack.Like a firewall.

Arrives ready to rack. Pre-installed. A first-boot wizard sets IPs, certificates and the starter rule pack.
Sits beside your firewall. Plug it inline, point DNS at it, or point apps at it.
Two networks, never mixed. The admin interface is never reachable from the data side.
No cloud needed. Runs and is managed entirely inside your walls.

See it work

Masked: the provider sees placeholders. Your employee sees the real answer.

Employee types

Employee sees

NEURO
WARD
▲▼

Provider receives

Provider replies

Synthetic data only · other rules block the request or only log it · cards and IBANs are verified by checksum

The product today

Built, tested, ready to pilot.

WORKING

Detect, then decide

Built-in packs for Türkiye and the Gulf: UAE, Saudi, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman IDs, tax numbers, IBANs, cards, keys. Each rule can mask, block or only log.

WORKING

Streaming restore

Placeholders are swapped back in live token streams, even when split across packets. Chat UIs keep working.

WORKING

Observe first

Run on live traffic without changing anything. See what would be caught. Switch to enforce when the rules are tuned.

WORKING

Block before connect

Blocked requests never open a connection to the provider. Tests confirm zero bytes leave.

WORKING

AI chat websites

Covers the browser chat sites too. Block them with a notice page, only observe, or stop messages that carry sensitive data.

WORKING

Key vault and egress list

Provider API keys live encrypted on the box, so apps never see them. An allow-list limits where the box can connect.

WORKING

Tamper-evident audit

Every decision gets a log ID. Logs hold types and counts, never the value. Hash-chained, verified in one click.

WORKING

Hardware, three modes

Ships as an appliance. Gateway, DNS or inline from the same box. Separate data and admin networks, hardened services.

Speaks OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini API formats · Works with existing SDKs · REST API for automation · English and Turkish dashboard

Competitive landscape

Big names, cloud first.Few built for in-country.

ApproachExamplesHow it is deliveredGap for a Gulf regulated buyer

Secure web gateways & SASEZscaler, NetskopeCloud proxy with TLS inspection. AI apps are a URL category with DLP policies on top.Traffic transits the vendor's cloud. Prompt-level controls can be a separate licence.

AI-security platformsPalo Alto Prisma AIRS, Cisco AI Defense, Lakera, Prompt Security, CalypsoAI, PangeaSaaS first. Palo Alto and Lakera offer customer-hosted options. Cisco's on-prem path is new.Sold as add-ons to large platforms. Local ID formats and in-country support are not their focus.

Redaction enginesPrivate AI (Limina), Microsoft Presidio, Azure PII container, NightfallAPIs and containers you run yourself. Presidio is open source and English-first out of the box.Components, not a product. You build the policy, audit trail and admin console.

AI gatewaysLiteLLM, Kong, Cloudflare AI GatewayRouting, cost and access control. Self-hosted options exist. PII control comes through plug-ins.Built for routing first. Data protection is something you configure on top.

NeuroWardHardware appliance in your rackGateway, DNS or inline mode. Per-rule mask, block or log. Restores inside streams, blocks before connecting.Hash-chained audit that never stores the value. Gulf ID packs built in.

A big vendor can add a Gulf ID rule in a week. It is much harder for them to ship a box that runs fully in-country with no vendor cloud, detects Arabic text on the device, and comes with a local team for sales and support. Regulated buyers ask for all of that. And once the rules are tuned on a customer's own traffic and the audit history sits on the box, switching is costly.

Compiled from vendors' public documentation and independent reviews, October 2026. Names shown as text only, no affiliation implied.

Performance & trust

A quarter of a millisecond.Your AI call takes seconds.

≤0ms

added latency at p99, full rule set, 4 KiB request

0K req/s

with masking and restore on

~0µs

added per streamed event

threats covered in the written threat model

Memory only. Real values live in RAM for the length of one request, then are wiped. Never on disk or in logs.
Memory-safe core. Data plane in Rust on a proven open-source proxy engine. Control plane in Go.
Separate networks. Admin and data traffic never share a port. Compromising the data path does not expose the database.

Straight talk

Detection is rule-based today. It catches structured data reliably, but not names or free-text addresses yet. On-device ML for that, including Arabic, is the first big roadmap item. NeuroWard stops accidental leaks. It is not built to stop a determined insider. All three modes run on our own office network: inline behind the office firewall, DNS by name redirect, gateway by base URL. The same build runs on x86 and ARM.

Benchmarks measured on a development laptop (i7-10750H, load generator on the same machine). Server-grade benchmarks and an independent pentest come first, in months 0–3, before any customer pilot.

Market

A new line item ina $6B Gulf security market.

0TAM · GLOBAL GEN-AI SECURITY, 2031

0SAM · GULF FLOOR / YR

0SOM · YEAR 3

TAM · Global generative-AI security$8.7B → $35.5B

2025 to 2031, 26.5% CAGR (MarketsandMarkets). LLM firewalls alone: $268M to $1.0B by 2033.

SAM · Gulf banks, telcos, government, insurers~$24M / yr

~200 banks, telcos and government bodies × ~$100K (two Enterprise for every Sovereign), plus ~120 insurers × $30K (Essential). Same prices as the business-model slide. Energy, large corporates, Kuwait, Oman and Türkiye are not counted, so this is a floor.

SOM · 20 customers by year 3~$1.5M ARR

14 banks, telcos or government bodies (10 Enterprise, 4 Sovereign) and 6 insurers (Essential). That is 7% of the large accounts and 5% of the insurers.

How we get there320 → 80 → 40 → 20

Target accounts, qualified conversations, observe-mode pilots, paying customers. Pilot to contract assumed at about 6 months. See the go-to-market slide.

Headline: GCC cybersecurity market ~$6.0B in 2025 (IMARC; PS Market Research ~$5.9B; MarketsandMarkets higher at ~$9.8B). Saudi Arabia alone: SAR 16.3B (~$4.35B), +10.7% (NCA via Arab News). Counts: SAMA, CBUAE Q4 2025, trade.gov, CBB (dated), Milliman, Arab News, DGA index; sources on the last slide. Contract values anchored on Vendr data.

The category is getting bought

Giants keep buying AI security.In April, one bought an AI gateway.

Palo Alto Networks · Apr 2026

Portkey

Undisclosed

AI gateway, now the control plane of its AI platform

Akamai · May 2026

LayerX

$205M

AI usage control in the browser, all cash

Cisco · May 2026

Astrix

~$400M

AI agent identity, reported

Fortinet · Aug 2026

Virtue AI

Undisclosed

AI runtime guardrails and red-teaming

2025: Lakera ~$300M (Check Point) · Pangea ~$260M (CrowdStrike) · CalypsoAI $180M (F5) · Prompt Security (SentinelOne)

The big vendors are folding AI security into their cloud platforms. Gulf banks, telcos and ministries that must keep data in-country need something that runs in their own data centre. We build for them.

Company names shown as text only, as public deal facts. Values per press reports (SecurityWeek, Calcalist, Pulse 2.0); Astrix is a press estimate. No affiliation implied.

Business model

Annual licence.Expands into governance.

Essential

$30K / year

One site, getting started

All three modes: gateway, DNS, inline
Türkiye and Gulf rule packs, observe & enforce
Dashboard, audit log, REST API
Business-hours support

Enterprise

$75K / year

Where most customers land

Custom rules and word lists
Key vault, egress list, chat-site controls
24/7 support, SSO and SIEM export as they ship

Sovereign

$150K+ / year

Banks, telcos, ministries

High-availability pairs, multi-site
Dedicated engineer, on-site support
Air-gapped and custom builds

Hardware costs $3–5K per appliance, sized to the tier and included in the licence: under 17% of a first-year Essential licence, nothing on renewal. Support is staffed by hires, starting with a support engineer in month 6. Each licence is bound to one appliance and verified offline; protection never depends on the licence.

Year 2+AI governance subscription: usage inventory, risk reports and audit packs built from the evidence the appliance already collects.

Anchors: DLP tools average ~$42K a year, range $20–82K (Vendr, Endpoint Protector); a cloud DLP vendor's median is ~$24K (Vendr, 31 purchases).

Go-to-market

Reaching the first 20 customers.Prove it on their own traffic.

1 · LAND · MONTHS 0–6

A Gulf sales lead, founders in the room

We hire a native Gulf enterprise sales lead in month 3, someone who already sells to banks and ministries. Founders run every demo. Introductions from investors are welcome, but we build the pipeline ourselves. Target: 3–5 design partners.

2 · PROVE · MONTHS 6–18

The observe-mode pilot

We rack the box next to the firewall and change nothing. In a few weeks the CISO sees what staff already send to AI providers. Then we switch to enforce. Target: 3 paying customers, 2 reference logos.

3 · SCALE · MONTHS 18–36

Partners and events

Regional integrators and managed security providers install and resell. Telco security arms as a channel. GITEX, LEAP, GISEC and Black Hat MEA for pipeline. Target: 20 customers.

PLANNING FUNNEL, THREE YEARS

Target accounts320

Qualified conversations80

Observe-mode pilots40

Customers20

Customers see their own data in the pilot before they buy. We are proving it in Türkiye first: we briefed a government agency, a holding and a bank. The agency and the bank want more, and the agency tests a demo unit from 1 November 2026.

320 target accounts: the counted Gulf universe of ~200 banks, telcos and government bodies plus ~120 insurers.

Roadmap and milestones

Product and customers, month by month.

✓ MVP built✓ All three modes tested✓ Gulf rule packs built in✓ 3 enterprise briefings: bank, government, holding→ Government agency demo, 1 Nov 2026

PRODUCT

MONTHS 0–3

Pilot-ready

Independent pentest, server benchmarks
Arabic interface

MONTHS 3–9

Enterprise-ready

SSO and MFA, SIEM export
Bypass network card, pilot units on site

MONTHS 9–15

Scale-ready

High-availability pairs
On-device ML for names and addresses, Arabic first

MONTHS 15–18

Seed-ready

Governance reports for local frameworks
Shadow-AI usage reports

COMMERCIAL

MONTHS 0–3

Design partners

Company formed, Gulf sales lead hired
3–5 design partners signed

MONTHS 3–9

Pilots

3 pilots live on customer servers
First paid pilot, support engineer hired

MONTHS 9–15

First contracts

First annual contracts signed
2 reference logos

MONTHS 15–18

Seed round

3 paying customers, ~$135K ARR
Seed round opened

Team

Three engineers.One working product.

Mücahit Büyükyılmaz

Computer Engineer · 15+ years

Founder and CTO. Has started companies before and run engineering in them. Two master's degrees. Leads the product and the company.

Alperen Adalar

Computer Engineer · Systems and DevOps

Runs the box itself: the operating system, hardening, packaging and the network setup that puts it in a customer's rack.

Berke Asmakaya

Computer Engineer · Full-stack

Builds the dashboard the security team works in, and the services behind it.

Built before raising: a Rust data plane, a Go control plane, a full dashboard and three working deployment modes. Next hires: a native Gulf sales lead in month 3 and a support engineer in month 6.

Financial plan

$1.2M for 18 monthsand three paying customers.

Planned spend, 18 months

Months 1–6$0.30M

Months 7–12$0.40M

Months 13–18$0.50M

Average burn about $67K a month. Includes a Gulf sales lead from month 3 and a support engineer from month 6. Customer revenue is not counted in the runway.

Revenue plan, ARR

Month 18$0.14M · 3

Month 24$0.54M · 8

Month 36$1.53M · 20

Customers shown after the dot. Tier mix and prices from the business-model slide. Seed round opens at month 18.

Measurable outputs

Month 3: sales lead hired, pentest passed, 3–5 design partners signed
Month 9: 3 pilots live, SSO and SIEM export shipped
Month 18: 3 paying customers, ~$135K ARR, seed round open
Throughout: pilot-to-paid conversion target of 50%

The ask

$0M

Pre-seed. 18 months of runway to reach three paying Gulf customers. A new company, incorporated where it suits our lead investor: ADGM, DIFC or Saudi Arabia. The founders join it full time, and all IP belongs to it. No former employer holds code or rights.

Engineering & product35%

Gulf sales: native sales lead, events, travel30%

Security & hardware: pentest, pilot units12%

Customer support hire10%

Company setup, legal, operations13%

Month 3Gulf sales lead hired, pentest passed, 3–5 design partners signed

Month 93 pilots live on customer servers, support engineer on board

Month 183 paying customers, ~$135K ARR, ready for seed

Contact: Mücahit Büyükyılmaz · m.buyukyilmaz@ecolarium.io

Appendix

Sources

Gartner: 40% of AI data breaches from cross-border GenAI misuse by 2027. gartner.com

IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2025: 97% / 63% AI access-control and governance gaps; $4.44M global average. Kiteworks summary · ASIS

Gulf data laws: UAE, KSA, Qatar, Bahrain comparison and penalties. GSDA · Auro Security · Kayrouz & Associates · Clyde & Co (SDAIA transfer rules)

Gulf AI spend: Saudi +124%, UAE +105%, ~20% of IT budgets by 2027. Middle East AI News

Global generative-AI spend: $202B by 2028 (IDC via SDAIA). Saudi Gazette

Generative-AI cybersecurity market: $8.65B (2025) to $35.5B (2031). MarketsandMarkets

LLM firewall market: $268.4M (2025) to $1.0B (2033). MetaStat Insight

GCC cybersecurity market: ~$6.0B in 2025 (IMARC) · ~$5.9B (PS Market Research) · ~$9.8B (MarketsandMarkets). IMARC · PS Market Research · MarketsandMarkets

Saudi cybersecurity market: SAR 16.3B in 2025, +10.7%, 69% private. Arab News (NCA data)

Acquisitions 2026: Palo Alto / Portkey Pulse 2.0 · Akamai / LayerX SecurityWeek · Fortinet / Virtue AI SecurityWeek · Cisco / Astrix SecurityWeek June roundup (value is a press estimate)

Acquisitions 2025: Lakera / Check Point Calcalist · CrowdStrike, Check Point SiliconANGLE · September roundup SecurityWeek · SentinelOne / Prompt Security Calcalist

Competitors: Palo Alto Prisma AIRS docs · Cisco AI Defense reference architecture · Zscaler blog · LiteLLM + Presidio docs · Private AI product page · Lakera pricing summary

Price anchors: Nightfall median ~$24K/yr, 31 purchases Vendr · Endpoint Protector DLP ~$42K avg, $20–82K Vendr

Organisation counts: UAE banks CBUAE Q4 2025 · KSA banks list · Qatar trade.gov · Saudi government DGA readiness index · GCC telcos Arab News · Saudi insurers Milliman

Gulf pre-seed cheques: Riyadh investor directory

Regional venture: MENA VC $3.8B in 2025; pre-seed and seed up 17% in the Middle East (MAGNiTT). Arab News

Compiled from public sources, October 2026. Nothing in this deck is a claim of regulatory compliance.