Intella, a provider of Arabic language artificial intelligence speech tools, including transcription and analysis, today announced it raised $12.5 million in an oversubscribed early-stage funding round to scale up its platform and increase market outreach.

The Series A round was led by Prosus. Investors also included 500 Global, Wa’ed Ventures, Hala Ventures, Idrisi Ventures and HearstLab, the investment arm of Hearst Corporation. This new funding brings the total capital raised by the company to around $16.9 million.

Founded in 2021 by Chief Executive Nour Taher and Chief Technology Officer Omar Mansour, Intella provides enterprise-oriented AI-enabled transcription, analytics and customer service engagement tools.

“Our models already set the benchmark for Arabic accuracy,” said Mansour. “Now, we’re focused on building truly intelligent, Arabic-first conversational agents capable of multi-turn dialogue and contextual understanding — redefining how enterprises engage with their customers.”

Intella said its current speech-to-text AI models have a proven accuracy of over 95.7%, which the company said provides the necessary language clarity to move beyond generalist AI and localize using human-like conversation across Arabic-speaking regions.

It’s important to note that Arabic speech is diverse and not a monolith. It consists of 25 major dialects, with a number of sub-dialects. They are often categorized into five main groups: Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, Maghrebi and Mesopotamian (spoken primarily in Iraq). Though speakers of some dialects may understand each other with context, others will struggle significantly to communicate.

Written communication has been influenced by Modern Standard Arabic, which is essentially the language of formal education and is used widely across literature, print, mass media and legislation. Although it is not generally spoken, its presence as a written language allows for easier standardization.

Of course, people don’t hold daily conversations in MSA – it would be similar to speaking in literary Latin. They use more colloquial, ordinary speech, which is directly influenced by their regional dialect. Intella said that by enabling businesses to talk to people in their own language, it opens up opportunities they might otherwise miss.

Using the funding, the company said it intends to expand further across the Middle East and North Africa region, where Intella believes it will have the greatest impact with its new AI models and services.

“The market opportunity in MENA is enormous, with over 7,500 companies and organizations operating across the region and Arabic being the fifth most spoken language globally,” 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.”

Using its platform’s AI-powered Arabic speech capability, Intella unveiled Ziila, the company’s “digital human,” earlier this month in partnership with Jumia Technologies AG, Africa’s largest e-commerce platform.

The company said it would use the funding to launch new AI agent conversational capabilities, including Ziila, to work in conjunction with the company’s existing speech intelligence tools. That will create a complete product suite that will allow enterprise businesses to build voice-based customer experiences that can speak native Arabic dialects and deliver conversational analysis.

Image: Intella