Sawt, a Saudi-based startup building AI-native voice call systems, has raised $1 million (SAR 3.75 million) in a pre-seed round led by STV and T2. The company is developing Arabic-language voice agents for use in customer support, bookings, and sales, targeting an underserved niche in the GCC’s AI infrastructure stack.
The round marks the first investment from STV’s newly launched $100M AI fund and includes a strategic partnership with T2, giving Sawt access to enterprise customers and infrastructure support.
Founded earlier this year by Abdulmalik Al-Saeed, Khalid Al-Jaraiwi, and Bassem Al-Harbi, Sawt has built Arabic voice AI models in-house, focused on natural language processing and speech synthesis tailored to the Gulf dialects. In the two months since launch, it claims to have powered hundreds of thousands of customer voice interactions across dozens of businesses in the Kingdom.
“The idea was simple: rethink the voice call from scratch,” said Abdulmalik Al-Saeed, co-founder and CEO of Sawt. “We’re not building on top of legacy systems – we’re rebuilding the voice layer in Arabic, for Arabic.”
Sawt’s models are deployed as end-to-end voice agents capable of handling inbound and outbound calls with minimal latency, offering 24/7 availability without live agents. The startup is betting that high call volumes, rising labor costs, and enterprise interest in automation will converge to reshape the GCC’s $800 million–$1.2 billion customer support market.
“Sawt is a strong example of a Saudi-born, AI-first company that can scale regionally,” said Ahmad Al Naimi, General Partner at STV. “We’re excited to back them as our first investment from the STV AI Fund.”
The funding will be used to expand Sawt’s team, improve technical infrastructure, and further develop its proprietary speech models. The company says it prioritises enterprise-grade privacy and local data compliance, features that could differentiate it in a market increasingly sensitive to data localistion and digital sovereignty.
Saudi Arabia’s national AI strategy, which ties 66 out of Vision 2030’s 96 objectives to AI and data, has made Arabic-language models a growing area of local focus. Sawt is one of a handful of early-stage startups building foundational Arabic voice infrastructure from within the Kingdom.
