AIRA LABS, the Leni Robredo-endorsed AI firm with big ambitions

2026-03-03 - 07:33

Some quotes have been translated from Filipino to English for brevity. Artificial intelligence this, artificial intelligence that — my feed across social media has certainly not been short on whatever new thing there is about AI, as I assume yours has been as well. But one local company in the second half of 2025 caught my eye: AIRA LABS AI. On Facebook, I regularly saw their posts showing multiple screens containing stats, figures, data and analytics — a graphical user interface of what they call the “AIRA Command Center” powered by their proprietary AI system called “AIRANET Core.” The command center is presented as an all-in-one hub for either a government or private organization’s digital operations, spanning applications from retail businesses, urban management to law enforcement. In December 2025, the company made a bigger splash when it announced that it had deployed the system in Naga, in partnership with the city and its mayor, Leni Robredo. Then at AIRA LABS’ official launch for its Command Center, Friday, February 27, at The Podium in Ortigas, Robredo attended and delivered the keynote address. Robredo said: “As a local chief executive, I acknowledge that for all its risks, AI holds tremendous potential, particularly in improving governance and public service delivery. Used wisely, AI can enhance the delivery of basic services, improve efficiency in government operations, strengthen citizen participation in democratic processes, and enable data-driven, evidence-based policy decisions. “This is something we are hoping to do in my home city of Naga. Amid the challenges of our times, such as urban planning, traffic management, and disaster response. We know that we must transcend the old way of doing things.” For instance, Naga citizens, through the MyNaga app, are able to file complaints ranging from broken streetlights, public safety issues to something more mundane as animal poop on the streets. Where does AIRA come in? The former vice president said: “AIRA LABS developed MyNaga’s AI triage system, making it easier for us to categorize, prioritize, and route reports to the right departments. Before, when we didn’t have AIRA, everything was done manually. As complaints and issues came in, a very small team of very young staff had to sort through them one by one and route them to the proper offices. But with AIRA LABS’ help, they now handle the triage using AI, and the reports go directly into the systems of our different departments.” Since MyNaga was launched at around the same time Robredo took office in Naga in 2025, the app has been downloaded 32,000 times, with 22,000 active users, and a total of 4,500 reports. Robredo also said they are working with AIRA LABS for a “procurement anomaly detection tool which flags and reviews anomalous contracts and contractors for both infrastructure and non-infrastructure expenses using 18 forensic criteria.” The company presented it to Robredo on Tuesday, February 24. A proposed system allows for a unobscured view of the procurement process from “end-to-end.” Robredo explains: “So for example, procurement, we should be able to see everything from budgeting until payment... but you need multiple programs to access all of that information. It’s hard to get real-time data with one click because the data is separate from one another. Everything was in silos when I assumed office. It still is until now. But slowly, we are improving on that already.” Robredo also assured that the technology and systems that they use are vetted carefully before implementation. “The council vets and screens every technology before the city adopts it so that we are not captured by vendors or dazzled by tools that do not serve our people. It sets the standards for how artificial intelligence is used across all the city systems,” she said. For a very young company that only saw its inception in late 2024 before incorporating in May 2025, Robredo’s backing is a boon. Its co-founders, president Karl del Val and chief systems developer Jason dela Rosa, told Rappler about their big ambitions for the company, looking at both government and enterprise projects, and hoping for further regional and global expansion. Tech companies face a trust deficit nowadays as people are more wary of their data being misused. To get what amounts to an endorsement by Robredo, known for transparency and good governance, and to have Naga City as a test bed for trustworthy and essential use cases are huge for the company, and its future. Dela Rosa says they have been approached by organizations in Indonesia, Singapore, and Africa which have expressed interest in the product. While the focus is on local government unit implementation, he says the goal as well is to be in three countries outside of the Philippines this year. “We have the opportunity to make a Filipino product that will put the Philippines ahead of all Southeast Asian countries in terms of AI governance if we do this right,” he said. A self-funded passion project by two friends Karl del Val, president of AIRA LABS, shows an overview of the Command Center with a bird’s eye-view of the city streets where incidents can be monitored and acted upon During their presentation, I did not notice the jitters or stiffness that might be somewhat expected of a company presenting its product for the first time to an audience of LGU and government representatives and entrepreneurs on a live stage. In a later conversation, I would find out that the secret is simple: the two founders are seasoned figures in the information technology and startup sectors, with more than two decades of experience and knowledge in both the business side and the technical side of programming. Del Val has worked with multinational firms, including Microsoft – specifically their Singapore office – and the British-American insurance advisory firm Towers Watson. Dela Rosa, on the other hand, says, “I’ve been building startups my whole life. And everything is about technology [since the] ‘90s,” adding to his credit having built “the first e-commerce” and “the first e-learning” platforms. Del Val also mentions Dela Rosa for his previous role in KITA Agritech Corporation, assisting farmers for more equitable trade via digital technologies, and now serves, according to Business World, the “biggest hotels, restaurants, and retailers, one of which is the retailing giant SM Supermarkets that is at the same time a major investor.” The two friends have also worked together “for the past 10 years on different projects,” including blockchain-related ones. “We both have backgrounds in technology as programmers. But when we met, we used our knowledge of technology to actually build businesses,” Del Val said, noting the importance of understanding both aspects in order to achieve scale. In building AIRA LABS, Del Val recalls: “As a kid from the ‘90s or even ‘80s, we remember our cartoons, we remember Star Trek, where you’re just talking to the computer and getting all of the information. We said, shucks, we can do that now.” Star Trek aside, Del Val also mentions Iron Man’s AI assistant as an inspiration. In their earliest conversations, Del Val said that AI started as a “play tool” or “a game for us,” but after a while, he said, “This can actually bring value to the people on the ground... it developed eventually into a passion project that we are surprised, at this point in time... it can actually benefit the whole country.” How did the partnership with the local government of Naga come about? “So we had some partners as well. We cannot say naman na kami lang gumawa. We had some people who opened doors for us. Thank you to them as well,” Del Val said succinctly, without expounding. AIRA LABS is self-funded by the founders, along with “quiet” partners, the co-founder said. Plans for future funding rounds “are in the pipeline.” Avoiding the generative AI hype Chief systems developer Jason dela Rosa presents at the Command Center launch, Friday, February 27, 2026 Dela Rosa stresses how they sought to avoid the generative AI “hype” and build something truly “meaningful” based on a foundation of data science, high-quality local data and algorithm. “That’s why 90% of generative AI pilots (alluding to an August 2025 MIT report), they say, fail in enterprises. It’s because there’s no data science behind it” and the focus is just on generating content. (READ: Why no ROI on AI? Filipina tech CEO says, it can’t be treated as mere software rollout) Dela Rosa provided a use case related to law enforcement deployment, illustrating how the use of as many data streams as possible may make for the most impactful results: “If we’re going to route the most perfect police asset to the incident, it can’t merely just who’s the nearest. It has to be the most optimal. Like, based on traffic, is that police asset really the nearest? So, you study traffic data. Is one police car stuck in a one-way road, which might be reason why he’ll take a longer time to respond? Or, is the police car or asset going to another incident? All of those data points are very important in generating something meaningful for the LGU or the enterprise to make decisions.” He continues, making examples of problems of street sanitation, crime in low-light areas, drainage problems, with the AIRA Command Center able to show a “bird’s eye view” of the city. The command center, with the example of Naga City’s implementation, is integrated with a citizen input system through the aforementioned MyNaga app. These real-people reports are a source of valuable “on the ground data and sentiments” that you don’t always find on social media. Dela Rosa talks data sovereignty as well — the concept that sensitive data should be contained within equipment or servers owned by the state itself rather than being stored on servers owned by private international service providers. The concept finds itself in practice, Dela Rosa claims, with their proposed LGU implementations. “We allow them to have an on-premise server, on-premise AI that allows them on-device, all-local access. Their data or trained model does not get out of their vicinity, so we can actually train their models on their ordinances, on their data...,” he said. Must Read What is NAICRI, the gov’t program seeking to harmonize the Philippines’ AI efforts? The surveillance question In our short interview, what I failed to ask further are key questions on data privacy and protections from state surveillance. As Dela Rosa himself said, “Our goal, really, for the country is to become a data-driven nation. Everything is about data. It really all starts with data.” AI, after all, is only as good as the data — the quality thereof, and the amount. So it should go without saying — with all of the potential data collection and the combination of several databases or data harmonization — that strict data protection practices and data minimization (the practice of using the least amount of data necessary for a function) must be enforced. Likewise, in the US, law enforcement apparatuses such as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) have employed the use of technology such as CCTVs in commercial locations, plate license detectors, and aggregate citizen data from health and tax services to form part of its surveillance dragnet. This would be an extreme example of how such a system could be abused to spy on people — a furtherance of the tech-dystopian scenario. But it’s also — in an era of general distrust towards any company, whether in tech or other sectors, that collect data from people — certainly something to avoid for emerging local tech and AI firms, including our subject today, AIRA LABS. Again, that’s why the Robredo-led local government’s partnership with the firm means a lot here. It’s trust by association, and a launchpad for the firm to earn more through its future actions. Finishing her keynote, Robredo said, the true measure of these new technologies can be measured by the answers to the most simple questions: “Did it reach the person who needed it most? Did it make life a little more dignified? Are we a little more secure?” “As AI continues to rise at an unprecedented pace, we find ourselves at crossroads on how to define our future within it. To me, this means insisting that people remain at its heart and at its core. The genie is out of the bottle. We cannot force it back in. But the imperative for us is clear – to ensure that AI serves humanity’s highest aspirations,” she concluded. – Rappler.com Must Read ICE surveillance is a warning on data protection and privacy rights