Riyadh-based Intella, the market leader in dialectal Arabic speech intelligence, has closed an oversubscribed $12.5 million Series A round led by Prosus. The funding will accelerate the company’s mission to power a digital AI workforce across the Arabic-speaking world by doubling down on R&D, product expansion, and regional hiring.
By the Numbers
The funding round is a testament to Intella’s market leadership and impressive growth:
- $12.5 Million: The total value of the oversubscribed Series A round.
- $16.9M+: The total funding raised by the company to date.
- 95.7%: The global record accuracy achieved by Intella’s proprietary speech-to-text models.
- 7x Growth: The company’s projected revenue growth in 2025, after more than doubling its revenue in 2024.
A Leader in Dialectal Arabic AI
Founded in 2021 by CEO Nour Taher and CTO Omar Mansour, Intella has emerged as a clear leader in Arabic speech services, offering enterprise-grade transcription, analytics, and AI-powered customer engagement tools tailored to more than 25 Arabic dialects. This is a crucial differentiator, as Modern Standard Arabic is rarely used in everyday speech, and the complex, fragmented landscape of regional dialects has historically challenged AI models.
“From day one, our vision has been to bridge the gap between global AI advancements and the Arabic-speaking world,” said Nour AlTaher, Co-founder and CEO of Intella. “This funding from Prosus… is a testament to the technology we’ve built and the market leadership we’ve established”.
Deepening Enterprise Capabilities and Regional Expansion
The new capital will be strategically deployed to deepen Intella’s enterprise capabilities, including the launch of its new conversational AI agent, Ziila, which recently debuted in a partnership with e-commerce giant Jumia. The funding will also accelerate the company’s MENA expansion, scaling its go-to-market teams in Egypt and Saudi Arabia to meet surging demand from the finance, telecommunications, and government sectors.
“The market opportunity in MENA is enormous… Yet Arabic AI models have historically underperformed,” said Robin Voogd, Head of Middle East Investments at Prosus Ventures. “Intella is changing that. We’re excited to back the company and support its mission of building AI locally, for the Arabic-speaking world”.
Source: MEA Tech Watch
