Riyadh-headquartered AI startup Intella has raised <head>2.5 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round led by Prosus, with participation from 500 Global, Wa’ed Ventures, Hala Ventures, Idrisi Ventures, and HearstLab, it announced today. The round brings the company’s total funding to <head>6.9 million.It previously raised $3.4 million in a pre-Series A led by Hala Ventures and Wa’ed Ventures in October 2023 and <head> million in a seed round led by Hala Ventures in March 2022.Founded in Egypt in 2021 by CEO Nour Taher and CTO Omar Mansour, Intella offers enterprise-grade transcription, analytics, and AI-powered customer engagement tools tailored to more than 25 Arabic dialects.The startup’s proprietary speech-to-text models have achieved what it claims is a global record accuracy of 95.73% for Arabic transcription, significantly outperforming major competitors including Google Cloud (62.5%), Microsoft Azure (66.2%), and IBM Watson (59.1%).“From day one, our vision has been to bridge the gap between global AI advancements and the Arabic-speaking world,” said Nour Taher, co-founder and CEO of Intella. “This funding from Prosus, a powerhouse investor with deep operational expertise, is a testament to the technology we’ve built and the market leadership we’ve established.”Arabic is the world’s fifth most spoken language, with over 350 million speakers, yet most AI models don’t handle it well. Everyday conversations happen in more than 25 main dialects and countless sub-dialects, not in Modern Standard Arabic, making it difficult for generic models to understand and process.Intella has built its business around this complexity, developing deeply localized, data-driven AI models that serve enterprises across finance, telecommunications, government, and media sectors. The company more than doubled its revenue in 2024 and is targeting 7x growth in 2025.“The market opportunity in MENA is enormous, with over 7,500 companies and organizations operating across the region,” said Robin Voogd, Head of Middle East Investments at Prosus Ventures. “Yet Arabic AI models have historically underperformed—challenged by complex phonetics, a lack of standardized spoken Arabic, and limited access to high-quality dialect-specific data. Intella is changing that.”The startup recently demonstrated its commercial strength through the launch of Ziila, its Arabic-born digital human, in partnership with Jumia, Africa’s largest e-commerce platform. The collaboration powers a new voice-ordering feature for Jumia customers, marking an important milestone in proving the technology’s capability to handle complex dialects in real-world environments.Intella’s comprehensive product suite includes three main offerings: intellaCX, a full-fledged data analytics tool for call centers that transforms conversations into actionable insights through transcriptions, performance tracking, KPI management, and sentiment analysis; intellaVX, which delivers 95.7% transcription accuracy using an advanced speech-to-text engine skilled in 25+ dialects, featuring noise filtering and speaker diarization for up to 8 speakers; and intellaMX, an AI transcription service for media content that offers customizable features including API access, media subtitling with timestamps, SRT extraction, and English translation.The platform serves diverse use cases across industries. For call centers, it provides real-time transcription, call summarization, keyword flagging, topic extraction, sentiment analysis, and agent scoring. Media companies benefit from quick and accurate transcription with SRT format export, English translation capabilities, bulk upload options, and complete video subtitle synchronization.The platform also serves educational technology by enhancing SEO through transcribed content, creating subtitles for accessibility, and enabling content repurposing for marketing. Additionally, it supports consulting firms with meeting documentation, market researchers with detailed interview transcriptions, and offers multi-language translation across 30+ languages.The Series A funding will be deployed across three key areas: deepening enterprise capabilities through the expansion of its conversational AI agent Ziila, accelerating MENA expansion by scaling go-to-market teams in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and continuing R&D investments to maintain its technological edge in Arabic-first AI development.AuthorRecent Posts Post Views: 2,820