About
Fanal is data pipeline incident intelligence — built for every team that depends on data pipelines to do their work. From the engineer who gets paged at 3am to the finance director whose board report is wrong, we close the loop.
Context
Built for the Google for Startups AI Agents Challenge 2026, Track 1: Build Net-New Agent.
Submitted from Gaborone, Botswana — one of a handful of African entries in the global cohort.
Powered by Google Agent Development Kit, Gemini 2.5 Pro, BigQuery MCP, and Cloud Run.
The name
/fəˈnɑːl/ · noun · Portuguese / French nautical
A fanal is a signal lantern hung at the bow of a ship or from a lighthouse to warn of danger and guide vessels to safe passage. When conditions became hazardous, the fanal was the first light sailors trusted — visible to all, carrying one clear message: take care, something is wrong ahead.
Mission
Existing data observability tools — Monte Carlo, Bigeye, Soda — are excellent at telling the engineer that something broke. But they stop there.
The engineer then manually writes a Slack message, pings the BI lead, tries to estimate the impact, and eventually someone remembers to tell finance that their Monday report will be wrong.
That entire process is what Fanal automates. Detection to full stakeholder notification, with financial impact and a postmortem, in under 60 seconds.
"Every team that depends on data deserves to know when it breaks — not just the engineer who gets paged."
Fanal mission statement
Technology
We respond within 24 hours.