Saudi Arabia-headquartered Intella has raised $12.5 million in a Series A round led by Prosus Ventures, with participation from 500 Global, Wa’ed Ventures (Aramco’s VC arm), Hala Ventures, Idrisi Ventures, and HearstLab. The raise brings Intella’s total funding to $16.9 million.
Founded in Egypt in 2021 by Nour Taher (CEO) and Omar Mansour (CTO), Intella develops AI models designed for Arabic dialects, offering enterprise transcription, analytics, and customer engagement tools across more than 25 dialects. Its proprietary speech-to-text models have reached 95.73% accuracy, a global benchmark for Arabic, according to the company.
The fresh capital will fund R&D, expand go-to-market teams in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and support the launch of Ziila, Intella’s Arabic-born digital human. Ziila debuted this month in partnership with Jumia, Africa’s largest e-commerce platform, powering a new voice-ordering feature for customers.
“From day one, our vision has been to bridge the gap between global AI advancements and the Arabic-speaking world,” said CEO Nour Taher. “This funding from Prosus, a powerhouse investor with deep operational expertise, is a testament to the technology we’ve built and the market leadership we’ve established.”
Prosus’ Robin Voogd, Head of Middle East Investments, noted: “Arabic AI models have historically underperformed—challenged by complex phonetics and fragmented dialects. Intella is changing that. We see many global opportunities to build in AI, and Intella is doing just that.”
Intella more than doubled revenue in 2024 and projects 7x growth in 2025, supported by demand from financial institutions, telecom operators, and government clients. The company’s business model combines enterprise SaaS and API integrations, with revenues generated from transcription services, analytics, and conversational AI deployments.
