Dawn started in 2024.
It started with a file. Mine. I went back through everything that had been recorded about my own attack, and what shocked me was not how little was there. It was how much. Signals everywhere. Reports that contradicted each other. Escalations no one connected. Agencies holding different pieces of the same story, none of them seeing it whole. The information existed. It lived in pieces, in places that did not talk to each other, and by the time anyone could have joined it up, the worst of it had already happened.
That is the gap Dawn is built to close.
Every institution responsible for preventing harm holds a fragment of the picture. Police see crime. Councils see safeguarding. Schools see children. Charities see the people the system loses. The harm itself does not care about any of those boundaries. The institutions trying to prevent it do. The cost of that gap is paid in lives, in budgets, and in public trust, six months too late.
Dawn does not predict individuals. Does not score them. Does not surveil them. UK regulation is moving against those tools every twelve months, and Dawn is moving the other way on purpose. Advisory by architecture. Enforced in code. Built into the gaps the institutions cannot cross on their own.
Leah-Sunshine Garrett
The signals are already there. They are scattered across incident records, referral patterns, safeguarding data and everything a community already knows about itself. Nobody is joining them at scale.
So the response is reactive by design. By the time a pattern is recognised, the harm has already happened to somebody.
Dawn exists to change the timeline: to surface the pattern up to a year out, while there is still time to act on it.
Every neighbourhood in the UK. 19 offence types, monthly, up to a year in advance.
Our deepest coverage is on the offence types that carry the most harm: domestic abuse, sexual offences, stalking, harassment, honour-based abuse, forced marriage, serious violence and drug offences.
Domestic abuse does not exist as a downloadable series. It is a flag on recorded offences, not an offence class of its own, and it is absent from the open street-level data entirely. Dawn built the series that should already have existed.
Solo technical founder. Built the entire Dawn platform end to end. Coding since age eleven.
Co-author of AI for Equity (Emerald Publishing, 27 October 2026). Co-host of the AI for Equity podcast with Jenny Garrett OBE.
Politics and Psychology, University of Dundee. Finance, admin and male-dominated rooms across multiple countries before Dawn.
