Built for founders who need clarity before the day starts.
DESTA is an AI Chief of Staff. It tracks what is changing around your business, understands what you are working on, and delivers a daily operating brief - what matters now, what to ignore, and what to do next.
We built DESTA because we needed it.
DESTA started from a frustration that every founder we know shares: the gap between information and decisions is getting wider, not narrower.
There are more signals in the market than ever before - competitor moves, regulatory changes, funding rounds, talent shifts, partnership announcements, technology changes. The raw material for good decisions is out there. But it takes a founder two to three hours a day just to stay oriented. And most of that time is spent filtering noise, not making decisions.
We watched founders we respect build elaborate systems: Google Alerts stacked on newsletters stacked on Slack channels stacked on weekly analyst calls. Every one of those systems had the same flaw - they were built around topics, not decisions. They told you what happened. They never told you what it meant for the thing you were actually trying to decide.
So we built the tool we wanted. A daily operating brief that understands what you are working on, what you are deciding, and what mode you are in - then filters the entire external world through that lens. Not a dashboard. Not a feed. A brief that gets sharper every day because it learns from what you acted on and what you ignored.
We named it DESTA because the word means “joy” in Amharic. There is a specific kind of joy in starting your day with clarity instead of chaos - knowing what moved, what it means, and what to do about it. That is what we are building toward.
Help founders make better decisions, faster.
The best founders we know are not the ones with the most information. They are the ones with the best signal-to-noise ratio. They know what to pay attention to today, what to watch but not act on, and what to actively ignore.
That skill is learnable, but it takes years. DESTA accelerates it. Our mission is to give every founder - whether they are running a five-person startup or a 500-person growth company - the decision support that used to require a full chief of staff and a research team.
Not by replacing human judgment. By compressing the time between signal and decision so founders can spend their cognitive energy on the moves that actually matter.
Three beliefs that shape everything we build.
Decision-aware, not topic-aware.
Most intelligence tools organize information by topic - competitors, markets, regulations. DESTA organizes information by decision. If you are deciding whether to expand into a new market, DESTA surfaces signals that affect that decision - regardless of which topic they come from. A competitor hiring in that market, a regulatory change in that geography, a funding round by a company targeting the same segment - these all affect the same decision, but a topic-based system scatters them across three different feeds. DESTA connects them.
The best signal is filtered signal.
Most tools optimize for coverage - the more signals, the better. DESTA optimizes for decision relevance. Every signal that makes your brief has passed through a filter: Is this new information? Does it affect something you are actively deciding? Is the timing right for action? If the answer to any of those is no, it does not make the brief. We measure our quality by what we leave out, not what we put in.
AI should explain itself.
We do not believe in black-box intelligence. Every signal card in your DESTA brief shows why it made the cut: what changed, why it is relevant to your current priorities, what would change the recommendation, and where the information came from. If DESTA cannot explain why something matters to you, it does not belong in your brief. Founders trust systems they can interrogate.
Why not a dashboard?
Dashboards are built for monitoring. They assume you know what to look at and when to look at it. They show you everything and let you figure out what matters.
For a founder running a company, that is exactly the wrong design. You do not have time to scan a dashboard every morning and synthesize what changed. You need someone to tell you what changed and what it means.
That is why DESTA delivers a brief, not a dashboard. A brief is opinionated. It has a point of view. It says “this matters and this does not.” It prioritizes. It recommends. And it gets better at doing all of that because it learns from your decisions.
Dashboards are passive. Briefs are active. We built DESTA for founders who want to start the day with a decision advantage, not a data exploration session.
You can still explore deeper when you want to - every signal card links to sources and context. But the default experience is a structured, prioritized operating brief that respects your time and your cognitive load.
Built in Dubai, for founders everywhere.
Dubai is a city built by founders who bet on the future before the data confirmed it. It sits at the crossroads of markets - Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East - and founders here think globally by default.
That perspective shapes DESTA. We do not build intelligence tools for one geography or one industry vertical. We build for founders who operate across markets, who compete with companies they have never met in person, and who need to understand shifts happening in multiple time zones simultaneously.
DESTA is designed for founders who think about the world the way Dubai does - as a connected, moving system where the best signal often comes from an unexpected direction.
The AI Chief of Staff that learns like a great human one.
The best chiefs of staff in the world do something remarkable: they learn the founder's thinking patterns. They know what the founder cares about before the founder articulates it. They filter a hundred inputs down to three. They know when to push an issue and when to hold it for next week.
That is what DESTA is building toward. Today, DESTA delivers a daily operating brief that adapts to your priorities, your mode, and your bandwidth. Tomorrow, DESTA will connect external intelligence with your internal context - email, calendar, CRM, Slack - to give you a brief that sees the full picture.
We are building an AI that does not just understand the market. It understands you - how you think, what you value, what you tend to miss, and what you need to hear right now. Not to replace your judgment, but to extend it.
That is the vision. Every feature we ship moves us closer to it.