Intella, the Egypt-founded startup specialising in Arabic speech intelligence, has raised $12.5 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round, led by Prosus Ventures, to scale its dialect-aware AI models and push deployment across the Middle East and North Africa.
Since its founding in 2021 by CEO Nour Taher and CTO Omar Mansour, Intella has built an AI platform focused on more than 25 Arabic dialects. Its proprietary speech-to-text models have recorded a 95.73% transcription accuracy, a benchmark that positions it ahead in addressing Arabic speech’s linguistic complexity.
Its client base spans sectors like finance, telecommunications, and government, leveraging tools such as transcript analytics and conversational agents to convert spoken interactions into usable enterprise insights.
What the Funding Enables
- Research & Development Expansion: Further refine dialectal models, extend coverage of sub-dialects, and improve natural-language understanding.
- Product Growth: Deepening its analytics platform (intellaCX) and pushing its digital human “Ziila,” which enables voice-ordering and conversational use cases.
- Regional Scaling: Reinforcing go-to-market presence in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, while strengthening teams to better serve the MENA enterprise market.
Revenue more than doubled in 2024, and Intella projects up to 7× growth in 2025, reflecting growing enterprise adoption.
Arabic presents particular challenges: everyday speech uses regional dialects rather than Modern Standard Arabic, phonetic diversity is high, and training data across dialects is uneven. Intella’s approach to localising speech AI promises to reduce the mismatch that often makes global models perform poorly in real-world Arabic settings.
As more organizations demand voice-enabled services, accurate customer interaction tools, and localized conversational AI, Intella is well-positioned to be a foundational player in bridging the gap between global AI advances and the Arabic-speaking world.
The Series A round was led by Prosus Ventures, with participation from 500 Global, Wa’ed Ventures (Aramco’s VC arm), Hala Ventures, Idrisi Ventures, and HearstLab. With this financing, Intella’s total amount raised reaches approximately $16.9 million.
Intella’s rise highlights increasing investor confidence in regionally contextualized AI. As speech AI moves from generic solutions to dialect-aware platforms, organizations across MENA stand to benefit from more natural, accurate, and trusted interfaces—especially where voice is often the preferred mode of communication.
Read more on Tech Gist Africa:
Munify Secures $3M Seed Funding to Revolutionize Cross-Border Banking for Egyptians Abroad
Salasa, an Egyptian logistics and supply chain startup Scores $30M Series B funding round
Breadfast, an Egyptian food delivery startup Raises $10M in Funding