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Egypt-Based Cybersecurity Firm Buguard Completes Seed Fund
The investment round was led by MENA venture capital firm A15 and will help drive expansion into the GCC later this year.
Buguard, the Cairo-based offensive security and dark web monitoring company has announced the successful completion of a $500,000 seed funding round.
Fundraising was led by A15, one of the most prominent backers of early-stage startups in the MENA region, with participation from various other angel investors.
The $500,000 sum is Buguard’s first external investment, with the company having been bootstrapped since its launch in 2021. The funding injection will be used to grow the Buguard team and to expand further across the Gulf Coast Countries (GCC) later this year.
Youssef Mohamed, Buguard’s founder and Chief Technology Officer, said: “We are delighted to announce our fundraising, and I thank A15 for its great support. The world of dark web cyber threats is very real, dynamic, and growing. Any company can be a victim, and one must be prepared. We are already a global company, with clients across the world, but our immediate strategy is to grow even stronger in the GCC. We look forward to expanding into Saudi Arabia during 2023 and using our proceeds to help fulfill our significant growth potential”.
Since commencing operations, Buguard has helped many of Egypt’s leading businesses and developed a global client base spanning Saudi Arabia, the United States, France, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
Also Read: The Largest Data Breaches In The Middle East
The startup’s primary role is monitoring dark web marketplaces, hacking forums, underground channels, and private clouds to identify and neutralize data breaches across different venues. Buguard provides a wealth of security services, including penetration testing, phishing simulation, threat intelligence, and more. The company also offers a subscription-based SaaS product known as Dark Atlas that helps businesses prevent data breaches.
Founded in 2021, Buguard’s team comprises highly skilled security researchers and engineers. The company is renowned for exposing critical security vulnerabilities in tech giants, including Yahoo, PayPal, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, and even the U.S. Department of Defense.
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At I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai Concedes AI Must Deliver Real Value
Gemini 3.5, a personal agent called Spark, agentic shopping, and Android XR eyewear are all aimed at making AI feel useful, not just impressive.
Google’s annual I/O developer conference (I/O 2026) has recently become a status update on the same question: can the company turn its AI spending into products people use every day? This year, chief executive Sundar Pichai described Google as being in a phase of hyper progress, while conceding this is the part of the cycle where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.
The strategy on display was to push agents — AI systems that act on a user’s behalf — into nearly every Google product at once. Search now has an “intelligent search box” that returns generated explainer videos alongside links. Gmail, Docs, YouTube and Maps are gaining their own agent layers, including a Docs Live feature that turns spoken instructions into drafted text with citations.
Two new models, Gemini 3.5 and a cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, arrived the same day. Google says 900 million people now use Gemini, and that more than 50 billion images have been generated with it. The pricing tier names are likely to confuse buyers: a new AI Ultra plan launches at $100 a month, while the older Gemini AI Ultra drops from $250 to $200.
The flashier announcements were Gemini Omni, a video generator pitched as a more realistic answer to OpenAI’s discontinued Sora 2, and Gemini Spark, a personal agent that handles recurring tasks across a user’s Google account. A new universal shopping cart lets agents complete purchases across multiple retailers from inside Google itself, placing the company between the merchant and the buyer, and also owning the checkout.
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Google also confirmed its Android XR eyewear, built with Samsung and frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Audio-only glasses ship this autumn; a display-equipped version, which would superimpose live translations into the wearer’s field of view, is still in development. Both sets translate, however only the display version shows you the result.
What Pichai did not resolve is the bargain underneath all this. An agent is only useful to the degree it knows your calendar, your inbox, your shopping history and your physical surroundings. Google has now confirmed that, in time, the same context may carry advertising.
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