Riyadh-headquartered AI startup Intella has raised $12.5 million in an oversubscribed Sequence A funding spherical led by Prosus, with participation from 500 World, Wa’ed Ventures, Hala Ventures, Idrisi Ventures, and HearstLab, it introduced at present. The spherical brings the corporate’s whole funding to $16.9 million.
It beforehand raised $3.4 million in a pre-Sequence A led by Hala Ventures and Wa’ed Ventures in October 2023 and $1 million in a seed spherical led by Hala Ventures in March 2022.
Based in Egypt in 2021 by CEO Nour Taher and CTO Omar Mansour, Intella provides enterprise-grade transcription, analytics, and AI-powered buyer engagement instruments tailor-made to greater than 25 Arabic dialects.
The startup’s proprietary speech-to-text fashions have achieved what it claims is a world document accuracy of 95.73% for Arabic transcription, considerably outperforming main opponents together with Google Cloud (62.5%), Microsoft Azure (66.2%), and IBM Watson (59.1%).
“From day one, our imaginative and prescient has been to bridge the hole between international AI developments and the Arabic-speaking world,” mentioned Nour Taher, co-founder and CEO of Intella. “This funding from Prosus, a powerhouse investor with deep operational experience, is a testomony to the know-how we’ve constructed and the market management we’ve established.”
Arabic is the world’s fifth most spoken language, with over 350 million audio system, but most AI fashions don’t deal with it effectively. On a regular basis conversations occur in additional than 25 predominant dialects and numerous sub-dialects, not in Trendy Commonplace Arabic, making it troublesome for generic fashions to grasp and course of.
Intella has constructed its enterprise round this complexity, growing deeply localized, data-driven AI fashions that serve enterprises throughout finance, telecommunications, authorities, and media sectors. The corporate greater than doubled its income in 2024 and is focusing on 7x progress in 2025.
“The market alternative in MENA is gigantic, with over 7,500 firms and organizations working throughout the area,” mentioned Robin Voogd, Head of Center East Investments at Prosus Ventures. “But Arabic AI fashions have traditionally underperformed—challenged by complicated phonetics, a scarcity of standardized spoken Arabic, and restricted entry to high-quality dialect-specific information. Intella is altering that.”
The startup not too long ago demonstrated its industrial energy by way of the launch of Ziila, its Arabic-born digital human, in partnership with Jumia, Africa’s largest e-commerce platform. The collaboration powers a brand new voice-ordering characteristic for Jumia clients, marking an essential milestone in proving the know-how’s functionality to deal with complicated dialects in real-world environments.
Intella’s complete product suite contains three predominant choices: intellaCX, a full-fledged information analytics software for name facilities that transforms conversations into actionable insights by way of transcriptions, efficiency monitoring, KPI administration, and sentiment evaluation; intellaVX, which delivers 95.7% transcription accuracy utilizing a complicated speech-to-text engine expert in 25+ dialects, that includes noise filtering and speaker diarization for as much as 8 audio system; and intellaMX, an AI transcription service for media content material that gives customizable options together with API entry, media subtitling with timestamps, SRT extraction, and English translation.
The platform serves various use instances throughout industries. For name facilities, it supplies real-time transcription, name summarization, key phrase flagging, subject extraction, sentiment evaluation, and agent scoring. Media firms profit from fast and correct transcription with SRT format export, English translation capabilities, bulk add choices, and full video subtitle synchronization.
The platform additionally serves academic know-how by enhancing search engine optimisation by way of transcribed content material, creating subtitles for accessibility, and enabling content material repurposing for advertising. Moreover, it helps consulting companies with assembly documentation, market researchers with detailed interview transcriptions, and provides multi-language translation throughout 30+ languages.
The Sequence A funding will probably be deployed throughout three key areas: deepening enterprise capabilities by way of the growth of its conversational AI agent Ziila, accelerating MENA growth by scaling go-to-market groups in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and persevering with R&D investments to keep up its technological edge in Arabic-first AI improvement.
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