Why I Started Region Alert: From Tbilisi Riots to Real-Time Intelligence

A Georgian man was captured by occupying forces near Gori. It never made the front page of the New York Times. But in Tbilisi, where I lived with my wife and kids, it was the only thing anyone was talking about, and it signaled an escalation that the international community ignored until it was too late.

That gap between what locals know and what the world reports is where people get hurt. It is exactly why Region Alert exists.

Sean Hagarty

Founder of Region Alert. Former resident of Tbilisi, Georgia during multiple regional conflicts.

What Happens When Stability Evaporates in Hours?

In 2023, the Azeri-Armenian war unfolded a few hundred miles from our apartment. In the Caucasus, a war next door is not just news. It is a direct threat to logistics, fuel supply, and the safety of everyone you know. Georgia was being pushed to the brink, and most international observers had no idea.

What Request Came from the Field?

After moving back to the U.S., the calls kept coming. A partner operating near a border where ISIS cross-border bombings had become a weekly event did not 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.

Why Does Region Alert Exist?

The tools big NGOs and mining companies rely on are either too slow or too detached from ground truth. Region Alert is what I wish I had in Tbilisi: a system that monitors 1,000+ local sources. Telegram channels, regional radio, community forums, in 100+ languages and filters them into actionable intelligence for people whose lives depend on it.

Operational certainty is not about avoiding risk. It is about seeing risk clearly enough to navigate it.

How Does Living in a Conflict Zone Change Your Thinking?

Before I moved to Georgia, I consumed international news the way most people do -- headline scanning, maybe a long-form piece on the weekend. That changed the first time I heard gunfire from my apartment balcony and could not find a single English-language source confirming what was happening two blocks away.

Living in Tbilisi during the 2023-2024 protest cycles taught me that the information hierarchy is inverted in conflict zones. The most reliable, most timely intelligence lives at the bottom -- neighborhood Telegram groups, local radio call-ins, municipal Facebook pages. The international wire services sit at the top, summarizing events 12 to 24 hours after locals have already adapted. When you have children in a school that sits on a protest route, that gap is not academic. It is the difference between picking them up before the tear gas starts and getting a phone call from a teacher in a lockdown.

My wife and I learned to read Georgian Telegram channels before checking CNN. We learned that the tone of a local journalist's post -- the specific words they used, the urgency of their phrasing -- told us more about what was coming than any State Department advisory. That instinct became the foundation of Region Alert.

What Was the Incident That Started It All?

The specific moment came during a drive from Tbilisi toward the South Ossetian administrative boundary line. We were heading to a friend's vineyard, a routine weekend trip. What we did not know -- because no English-language source had reported it -- was that Russian-backed forces had moved a checkpoint forward by several kilometers the night before. Georgian-language Telegram channels had been warning about it since dawn. We found out when we saw armored vehicles blocking the road.

We turned around. Nothing happened. But the realization stuck: we had driven our family within an hour of an active military boundary shift without any advance warning, and the information to avoid it had been freely available in Georgian for eight hours before we left.

A few months later, a partner operating near the Turkish-Syrian border told me an almost identical story. They had personnel deployed 30 kilometers from an ISIS cross-border incursion and found out about it from a driver, not from their security provider. Their $200,000-a-year risk management subscription had failed to mention it because it was sourced from English-language wires that had not yet picked up the Arabic and Kurdish reports.

What Did Existing Solutions Get Wrong?

After the South Ossetia incident, I spent months evaluating every security intelligence platform I could find. The pattern was always the same.

The big platforms -- the ones charging $100,000 to $500,000 a year -- were built for Global Security Operations Centers (GSOCs) at Fortune 500 companies. They generated firehoses of data that required a full-time analyst team to interpret. A mining company with 40 employees in Cameroon does not have a GSOC. An NGO running health clinics in Tajikistan cannot afford a $250,000 platform that needs three people to operate.

The cheaper tools were notification systems, not intelligence systems. They would tell you an earthquake happened after the USGS reported it. They would send you a travel advisory that was copied from the State Department website. None of them monitored the local-language sources where the actual early warning signals lived. None of them read the Georgian Telegram channel that would have told me about the checkpoint shift.

The gap was clear. There was no product built for mid-market organizations -- mining companies, NGOs, logistics firms, oil and gas operators -- that delivered local-language, ground-truth intelligence at a price point that matched their budgets. The choice was between a $500,000 enterprise platform and checking Twitter yourself.

What Is the Vision Behind Region Alert?

The best intelligence I ever received in Tbilisi came from a Georgian friend who ran a small shop near Rustaveli Avenue. He would text me when he saw police staging. He would tell me when the neighborhood was tense. He knew things hours before the news because he was embedded in the community.

Region Alert is designed to replicate that kind of embedded, multilingual awareness at scale. We monitor over 1,000 local sources across 100+ languages -- not because the number is impressive, but because that is what it takes to cover the ground-level signals that matter. A Telegram channel in Douala reporting port congestion. A Tajik radio broadcast about a road closure. A Kurdish Facebook group discussing militia movements near a pipeline.

The goal is not to compete with Reuters or Bloomberg. The goal is to deliver the intelligence that those services structurally cannot provide -- the hyper-local, pre-escalation signals that exist only in local languages and local communities. That is the intelligence gap I lived through in Tbilisi, and it is the gap Region Alert closes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did you build Region Alert instead of joining an existing security intelligence company?

Because the existing companies are built around a model that does not serve mid-market organizations. They either sell enterprise platforms that require dedicated analyst teams, or they resell government advisories with a logo on top. Neither approach solves the core problem: getting local-language, ground-truth intelligence to the people who need it, at a price they can afford. I built Region Alert to fill that specific gap.

How does your personal experience in conflict zones shape the product?

It shapes every design decision. When you have lived through a situation where you needed actionable intelligence and could not get it, you build differently. Every alert we send is written the way I wish someone had communicated to me in Tbilisi -- clear, specific, and actionable. Not a data dump. Not a geopolitical essay. Just: here is what happened, here is what it means for your operations, and here is what you should do about it.

Is Region Alert only for conflict zones?

No. We cover any region where local-language intelligence provides an advantage over English-only monitoring. That includes countries experiencing political instability, regulatory unpredictability, infrastructure challenges, or supply chain volatility. Many of our clients operate in countries that are not technically "conflict zones" but where the information gap between local sources and international media creates real operational risk.