Prosus leads $12.5m Series A round
Intella, a provider of dialectal Arabic speech intelligence, has raised $12.5 million in an oversubscribed Series A round led by Prosus.
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Intella, a provider of dialectal Arabic speech intelligence, 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 investment arm of Hearst Corporation. The company has offices in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The funding will accelerate Intella’s mission to power a digital AI workforce across the Arabic-speaking world. With this new funding, Intella is doubling down on R&D, product expansion, and regional hiring to bring its vision to life.
Founded in 2021 by chief executive Nour Taher and chief technology officer Omar Mansour, Intella provides Arabic speech services including transcription, analytics and AI-powered customer engagement tools for more than 25 dialects. Its proprietary speech-to-text models have recorded an accuracy rate of 95.73%, which the company says allows businesses to deliver more localised and natural conversations at scale.
“The market opportunity in MENA is enormous, with over 7,500 companies and organisations 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. We see a lot of global opportunities to build in AI, and Intella is doing just that. We’re excited to back the company and support its mission of building AI locally, for the Arabic-speaking world.”
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