Investment of $12.5 million led by Prosus in Intella, a pioneer in Arabic speech analysis technology
Intella, a pioneering company in dialectal Arabic speech intelligence, has announced a significant milestone in its journey. The company has secured $12.5 million in a Series A round, led by Prosus, with participation from 500 Global, Wa'ed Ventures, Hala Ventures, Idrisi Ventures, and HearstLab.
This funding round marks a pivotal moment for Intella, as it aims to deepen enterprise capabilities, accelerate expansion in the MENA region, and innovate in Arabic-First AI. The funds will be strategically deployed to achieve these goals, with a focus on doubling down on research and development, product expansion, and regional hiring.
The company's proprietary speech-to-text models have already achieved a global record accuracy of 95.73%, setting a high standard in the industry. With this funding, Intella plans to push the boundaries of dialectal understanding even further, widening the accuracy gap against global competitors.
Robin Voogd, Head of Middle East Investments at Prosus Ventures, expressed his excitement about the investment, stating, "The market opportunity in MENA is enormous, and Intella is changing the game for Arabic AI models."
Nour AlTaher, Co-founder and CEO of Intella, shared her vision, saying, "The funding allows us to accelerate our goal of helping every enterprise in the region transform their customer conversations."
One of the strategic deployments of the funds will be the launch of a new conversational AI agent, Ziila, to work in tandem with Intella's intellaCX analytics product. The launch of Ziila marks a significant milestone, proving its capability to navigate complex dialects in a demanding, real-world environment.
Intella's focus now is on building truly intelligent, Arabic-first conversational agents capable of multi-turn dialogue and contextual understanding. The funds will also be used to scale go-to-market teams in Egypt and Saudi Arabia to meet the surging demand from the finance, telecommunications, and government sectors.
Intella, founded in 2021 by CEO Nour Taher and CTO Omar Mansour, supports a fast-growing portfolio of enterprises across the MENA region, spanning sectors such as finance, telecommunications, and government. The company offers enterprise-grade transcription, analytics, and AI-powered customer engagement tools tailored to more than 25 dialects.
In a debut partnership with Jumia, Africa's largest e-commerce platform, Intella unveiled Ziila, its Arabic-born digital human. With today's round announcement, the company has raised over $16.9 million in funding.
While specific other companies that participated in the Series A financing round of Intella are not mentioned in the available search results, it is not stated whether the investment round was oversubscribed. Despite this, the future of Intella and its mission to power a digital AI workforce across the Arabic-speaking world looks promising.
