Sean Hagarty: From Tbilisi Streets to Intelligence Operations
Sean Hagarty
Sean Hagarty didn't build Region Alert from a corporate office. He built it from Tbilisi, Georgia, where he lived with his wife and kids while the city erupted around them.
In 2023, the Azeri-Armenian war unfolded a few hundred miles from his apartment. In the Caucasus, a war next door isn't background noise. It's a direct threat to fuel supply, logistics routes, and everyone you know. Georgia was being pushed to the brink, and most international observers had no idea.
Tbilisi, 2023-2024: Massive riots, mass arrests, streets blocked, communication spotty. The "official" news sources were always three steps behind the reality on the corner of Rustaveli Avenue. Sean was on the ground for all of it, navigating real risk with his family, not analyzing it from a satellite feed.
A Georgian man was captured by occupying forces near Gori. It never made the front page of the New York Times. But in Tbilisi, it was the only thing anyone was talking about, and it signaled an escalation that the international community ignored until it was too late.
After returning to the U.S., the calls kept coming. A partner operating near a border where ISIS-linked cross-border bombings had become a weekly event didn't want a white paper on regional stability. They needed to know if a truck could pass a checkpoint right now. They needed to know about a drone strike 12 miles from their site minutes after it happened, not days later when mainstream media caught up.
A kidnapping incident near an operational zone made it clear: the gap between what locals know and what the world reports is where people get hurt. Existing tools were either too slow, too expensive, or too detached from ground truth.
Region Alert is what Sean wished he had in Tbilisi. A system that monitors the signals that matter, in the languages they originate in, and delivers them to the people whose decisions depend on them.