Egypt's Intella Raises $12.5M to Expand Arabic AI Speech Models
TLDR
- Saudi Arabia-based AI company Intella has raised $12.5 million in a Series A round led by Prosus Ventures
- Founded in Egypt in 2021 by CEO Nour Taher and CTO Omar Mansour, Intella develops AI models tailored to Arabic dialects
- The new funding will support product expansion, regional hiring, and R&D, as Intella scales go-to-market teams in Egypt and Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia-based AI company Intella has raised $12.5 million in a Series A round led by Prosus Ventures, with participation from 500 Global, Wa’ed Ventures, Hala Ventures, Idrisi Ventures, and HearstLab. The funding brings Intella’s total raised to $16.9 million.
Founded in Egypt in 2021 by CEO Nour Taher and CTO Omar Mansour, Intella develops AI models tailored to Arabic dialects. Its products include transcription, analytics, and conversational tools covering more than 25 dialects. The company says its proprietary speech-to-text models have achieved record accuracy rates of 95.73%.
The new funding will support product expansion, regional hiring, and R&D, as Intella scales go-to-market teams in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Intella has more than doubled revenue in 2024 and projects sevenfold growth in 2025. Its clients span finance, telecoms, and government sectors across MENA.
Earlier this month, Intella launched Ziila, a conversational AI agent, in partnership with e-commerce platform Jumia to enable voice ordering.
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Key Takeaways
Intella’s fundraising highlights the growing demand for localized AI in the Arabic-speaking world, where language complexity has long limited adoption. Arabic, spoken by over 400 million people globally, includes more than 25 dialects that global AI systems have struggled to process effectively. By building Arabic-first models, Intella is positioning itself as a foundational layer for enterprises in finance, telecoms, e-commerce, and government. Its strategy mirrors earlier global AI infrastructure bets, such as Stripe in payments or OpenAI in generative text. With Prosus leading the round, Intella gains backing from one of the world’s most active tech investors, strengthening its credibility in scaling across MENA. The company’s launch of Ziila, its digital human, also shows a push beyond transcription into real-time customer engagement, a sector with large commercial upside. If Intella succeeds, it could become the regional leader for voice and conversational AI, expanding into global markets underserved by English-first AI tools.
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