Saudi Arabia-headquartered AI startup Intella has raised $12.5 million in an oversubscribed Series A round led by Prosus, with participation from 500 Global, Wa’ed Ventures, Hala Ventures, Idrisi Ventures, and HearstLab. The round brings its total funding to $16.9 million, following $3.4 million in a pre-Series A in 2023 and $1 million in a seed round in 2022.
Founded in Egypt in 2021 by CEO Nour Taher and CTO Omar Mansour, Intella develops AI tools for Arabic dialects, covering more than 25 variations. Its proprietary speech-to-text engine has reached 95.73 percent accuracy, which the company said outperforms Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Watson on Arabic transcription benchmarks.
“Models have historically underperformed due to dialect complexity and limited access to data. Intella is changing that,” said Robin Voogd, Head of Middle East Investments at Prosus Ventures. “We’re backing its mission to build AI locally for the Arabic-speaking world.”
The company reported doubling revenue in 2024 and projects sevenfold growth in 2025. Clients include enterprises in finance, telecommunications, and government. Intella also launched Ziila, an Arabic-born digital human, with e-commerce platform Jumia to power voice-ordering, proving its technology can handle dialect complexity in live use cases.
The fresh capital will fund research and development, expansion of Ziila alongside IntellaCX analytics, and go-to-market hires in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
