From launch to break-even
Monthly recurring revenue in the first month
Countries covered with multi-lingual intelligence
Established providers replaced by AMS after adopting Conterra
OVERVIEW
Conterra’s founder spent nearly two decades running security operations across the Middle East. He’d used the existing intelligence providers for years and knew exactly where they fell short. What he needed was a partner who could turn that operational knowledge into a business – one that could launch quickly, take on established names and stay lean enough to turn a profit early. Three months after launch, it did.
THE BIG IDEA
A small team of analystswith the reach of a large one
Intelligence providers tend to fall into two camps. The automated ones publish whatever their systems pull in, so clients get told it’s going to be hot in Baghdad this summer alongside genuine security incidents. The manual ones employ large research teams who can only scan a handful of outlets, and you get two lines on an incident where you need a full page.
We designed Conterra around the strengths of each. AI handles the legwork – collecting from over 650 sources in multiple languages, translating them and classifying candidate incidents, so analysts start every review with structured material in front of them. Every incident is then checked by a person and written up in full, with severity, method, actor profile and separate ratings for source reliability and information credibility. The daily and weekly reports are written entirely by analysts, with AI used only to research and filter the intelligence behind them. When intelligence has to be faultless, people stand behind every word of it.
The result is a research operation that covers more incidents in its core market than any comparable platform, run by a team a fraction the size of its nearest competitor’s. That efficiency is what made break-even in the first quarter possible.
Our role – everything Conterra needed to get to market
Business Consultancy
We worked with the founder on positioning, product strategy and the commercial model – including a single subscription with no bolt-ons, which sets Conterra apart from providers that charge extra for reporting, seats or exports.
AI Platform Development
A multi-tenant platform with a specialised agent pipeline and analyst tooling built so a small team can review at speed.
Security & Compliance
OWASP-aligned practices, unit and end-to-end testing, audit logging and role-based access. The platform has to be as trustworthy as the intelligence it carries.
UX & UI
Interfaces for people making decisions under pressure, at a desk or in the field, with ongoing consultancy as new clients bring new needs.
Brand
The visual identity and tone of voice, positioned to resonate with security operators and enterprise buyers alike.
Marketing
The website and stationery for launch, plus social media templates and the email templates that carry Conterra’s reports to subscribers – the tools that keep the brand in front of its market week after week.
OUR ROLE
A deceptively deep product
Clients see a clean feed and a weekly report. Behind it sits the kind of depth you’d expect from enterprise software.
- Multi-tenant workspaces with per-client branding
- Invite-only passwordless sign-in
- Role-based access control
- Full audit logging
- Configurable data retention
- Multi-lingual source ingestion
- Analyst review queue
- Editor performance metrics
- Source quality scoring
- Interactive incident map and heatmaps
- Custom geofences
- Saved views as alert presets
- Statistics and trend analysis
- Route intelligence
- Ask Conterra AI assistant
- Telegram assistant and spot reports
- Export to Excel, CSV, PDF and map image
- Guest directory and distribution lists
- Expiring branded share links with engagement tracking
- Training resources library
- AI agent health monitoring
- AI cost tracking by client and model
THE RESULTS
The market responded immediately
Al Murabit Security Services, the region’s premier security company, cancelled two existing intelligence subscriptions after seeing Conterra and asked to pipe its data straight into their daily risk registers within five days. A second security client began the process of switching after a single demo – what convinced them was the branded reporting they could distribute to their own clients and the WhatsApp alerts that kept their teams informed without needing to open the platform.
Conterra now serves enterprise clients across eight countries with multi-lingual, interpreted intelligence. The platform we built powers all of it.
SERVICES DELIVERED
- Positioning and Product Strategy
- Commercial Model
- AI Agent Architecture
- Multi-tenant Platform Development
- Security and Compliance (OWASP)
- Unit and End-to-end Testing
- Telegram Integration
- Branded Report Distribution
- UX Consultancy
- UI Design
- Visual Identity
- Tone of Voice
- Website Design and Development
- Social Media Templates
- Report Email Templates
- Launch Marketing
YOUR BUILD ADVANTAGE
Built on Sonae, our multi-tenant AI platform
Everything we learned building Conterra is packed into Sonae. The foundational engineering is already done, so our time goes into the strategy that makes a product succeed.
I thought I was hiring a team to build a platform. What I actually got was someone who took my idea apart, worked out what it should be and built that instead. Conterra as it exists today is not what I briefed. It’s better, and I couldn’t have got here without them.
Ian Hamner, Founder CONTERRA