Detekta: Rebuilding Breach Reporting for the GCC With Controlled, Regulator-Aware, Enterprise-Class AI

A single breach can cost millions. A misreported one can cost trust. Detekta exists so the reporting process is never the costliest failure again.

Detekta was built by three founders: Lisa Laterza, Bella Belgarokova, and Karthi Velayutham.

Lisa Laterza is a serial entrepreneur, mentor at international startup programmes, and a mum of two who witnessed compliance teams drowning in manual reporting and last-minute regulatory stress, while Bella Belgarokova, a self-taught engineer, saw how easily operational risk emerges when compliance processes rely on emails and human memory instead of structured automation, and Karthi, experienced in scaling technical systems in high-pressure environments, reinforced the lesson that regulatory risk grows exponentially when reporting is reactive.

The move from Italy to the GCC marked a clear paradox: the region is building some of the most advanced fintech and financial infrastructure in the world, yet many institutions still rely on manual, legacy processes for compliance and breach reporting. “The GCC doesn’t need more compliance layers; it needs compliance infrastructure,” Lisa says.

Detekta changes that by helping financial companies report problems to regulators quickly and correctly, without panic or paperwork, using AI not to replace compliance teams but to give them something they’ve never had before: certainty under pressure. ‍

The Mission: Compliance Without Chaos

“By the time the report is ready, half the stress has already happened.”

“Late or unclear reporting damages trust faster than the incident.”

“We need something that works at 2 a.m., not another dashboard.”

Early conversations with compliance officers, regulators, and industry leaders across the GCC led them to build Detekta with a focus on breach reporting only, designed for cross-team coordination, speed, and auditability, treating the regulator as a first-class user.

Detekta was built region-first because the GCC is not a “lightly customised” version of Europe or the US. Dubai’s ecosystem showed them that the region doesn’t need imported compliance software retrofitted to local rules but purpose-built infrastructure that reflects how the GCC actually operates. Detekta is fast, trusted, and designed for the future of finance.

Compliance teams jump between emails, documents, chat threads, spreadsheets, internal guidelines, and external regulatory sources, all while the clock is ticking. Noting this, the founders say, “Detekta’s mission is to bring clarity, speed, and trust to regulatory breach reporting in the GCC.”‍

Redefining How GCC Institutions Classify, Structure, and Submit Breach Reports‍

“Compliance doesn’t fail because people lack tools; it fails because context is scattered,” the founders say.

That’s why Detekta was designed as one connected workflow.

In breach situations, nobody has the luxury of reading long regulatory texts or cross-checking interpretations. Detekta’s AI Assistant acts as a regulatory copilot, interpreting regulations, aligning responses with jurisdiction-specific requirements, applying the same logic consistently every time, and keeping context across the entire reporting workflow.

The founders saw that traditional breach-reporting workflows force people to manually transform raw, evolving incident data into final, regulator-ready narrative under extreme time pressure. Detekta’s Draft Tool flips that model. Instead of people drafting from scratch, Detekta ingests raw incident data as it emerges, structures it against requirements, and drafts a clear, regulator-ready report automatically.  

Now, no two regulators are identical. This is why Detekta is designed for six regulators (SAMA, CBUAE, CBB, QCB, CBK, and CBO). First, by mapping what they all have in common, and then layering jurisdiction-specific logic like thresholds, triggers, deadlines, data fields, formats, and language.

Traditional templates age quickly, encourage copy-paste behaviour, and don’t scale across regulators. Detekta’s AI-driven Prompts and Templates Library was built to adapt automatically to regulators, jurisdictions, and evolving regulations, while guiding users on why information is needed, not just where to put it. Detekta’s GCC Knowledge Base feeds AI copilots with jurisdiction-specific reasoning and keeps templates, prompts, and reports aligned with the current law.

Most importantly, the founders say, “In Detekta, AI is not a feature you turn on or off; it’s the invisible layer that makes the entire platform coherent, reliable, and trusted under pressure.”‍

Credibility Through Real Conversations

In a compliance-driven industry that’s naturally risk-averse, the founders approached banks, fintechs, insurers, and financial institutions with a few differences:

• They led with questions about reporting timelines, escalation pressure, and auditability
• They focused on one narrow, high-risk problem: breach reporting
• They welcomed scrutiny from legal, compliance, and risk teams into the product design process
• They positioned AI as risk reduction, not automation for its own sake

One thoughtful conversation with a compliance lead, regulator-adjacent advisor, or founder often led to two or three warm introductions. Then, founder-led thought leadership positioned Detekta as a serious, grounded player. Accelerators, closed-door roundtables, compliance-focused events, and ecosystem hubs created credibility by proximity.

In early conversations, they walked compliance teams through a realistic breach scenario and asked them to explain how they would handle it today. Then they showed them how Detekta would handle that exact scenario step by step. The first real proof point wasn’t a logo, a pilot, or a metric; it was seeing their own reporting pressure reflected back accurately.‍

From Early Traction to Operational Proof

‍The most defining feedback came after early demos, where several users said variations of: “If this works the way it looks, it would change how we feel during incidents.” To the founders, it confirmed that Detekta wasn’t just solving a procedural problem; it was addressing the emotional and cognitive load of compliance work under pressure.

During an early institutional validation, a compliance team was dealing with an incident that sat squarely in the grey zone. Within minutes of running the scenario through Detekta, the incident was qualified against the correct jurisdiction, and a regulator-ready draft that reflected their own standards was produced.

Here are a few milestones that the founders encountered:

• Teams running hypothetical breach scenarios, aligning policies, and using outputs as a reference during internal training through Detekta
• Institutions operating under different GCC regulators reacted in the same positive way to Detekta’s outputs
• When conversations shifted from “Can this handle our reporting?” to “How do we align our workflow with this?”‍

The hardest challenge was ensuring the AI never sounded more certain than the regulation actually is. To combat this, strict jurisdiction-aware logic, reasoned guidance, and traceability are built in. And technically, challenges were semantic interpretation, context preservation, and controlled drafting. The breakthrough was designing Detekta as a layered system with regulatory interpretation, incident structuring, and narrative generation, all governed by strict validation rules.

Dubai’s founder-driven culture gave the founders permission to rethink compliance processes without apologising for it, and being anchored in a hub like Meydan Free Zone helped them build infrastructure-level products, think region-first, engage directly with real operational pain points, and move fast. ‍

Looking Ahead

Certainty.

That’s what Lisa, Bella, and Karthi see Detekta creating for compliance in the GCC.

Detekta’s long-term ambition is simple: five years from now, institutions should say, “This is just how regulatory reporting works here now.” An evolution from automation infrastructure into regulatory intelligence infrastructure.

The founders say, “Today, Detekta focuses on removing friction from the most critical moment: breach reporting under pressure. As AI adoption matures, Detekta’s role will expand from helping institutions respond correctly to helping them anticipate, prepare, and continuously align.”‍

For the founders, Dubai and hubs like Meydan Free Zone set the bar by pushing Detekta to be region-first, regulator-aligned, and built to help define the future, not follow it.