Intella, a leading company in dialectal Arabic speech intelligence, has raised $12.5 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round. The round was led by Prosus and included 500 Global, Wa’ed Ventures, Hala Ventures, Idrisi Ventures, and HearstLab (the investment arm of Hearst Corporation).
The funds will help Intella expand its AI-powered digital workforce across the Arabic-speaking world. The company plans to increase research and development, grow its product offerings, and hire more staff in the region.
Intella was founded in 2021 by CEO Nour Taher and CTO Omar Mansour. The company has become a leader in Arabic speech services, providing enterprise-grade transcription, analytics, and AI-powered customer engagement tools that support over 25 dialects.
Its proprietary speech-to-text models have reached a global record accuracy of 95.73%, allowing businesses to go beyond generic AI and offer localized, human-like conversations at scale.
“From day one, our vision has been to bridge the gap between global AI advancements and the Arabic-speaking world,” said Nour AlTaher, Co-founder and CEO of Intella. “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. It allows us to accelerate our goal of helping every enterprise in the region transform their customer conversations from dark data into a strategic asset.”
“This round is a catalyst for our product roadmap,” added Omar Mansour, Co-founder and CTO of Intella. “Our models already set the benchmark for Arabic accuracy. 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.”
Arabic is not a single language—Modern Standard Arabic is rarely used in daily conversation. Different countries, and even regions within countries, have their own dialects, with over 25 main dialects and many sub-dialects. Intella uses a localized, data-driven approach, making it a key platform for Arabic voice and text applications.
Intella works with a growing number of enterprises across the MENA region, including companies in finance, telecom, and government. The company more than doubled its revenue in 2024 and is on track to grow seven times in 2025. With this funding round, Intella has raised over $16.9 million in total.
“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, 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.”
Showing its commercial strength, Intella introduced Ziila, its Arabic digital human, in a first-ever partnership this month with Jumia, Africa’s largest e-commerce platform.
Ziila powers a new voice-ordering feature for Jumia customers, demonstrating its ability to handle complex Arabic dialects in a real-world setting. This launch is an important milestone for Intella.
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