Intella secures $12.5M funding round to scale operations in MENA

Updated 9/2/2025 11:35:00 AM

Arab Finance: Intella, the market leader in dialectal Arabic speech intelligence, has closed a $12.5 million oversubscribed Series A round led by Prosus, bringing its total funding to $16.9 million, according to a press release.

The funding round witnessed the participation of 500 Global, Wa’ed Ventures, Hala Ventures, Idrisi Ventures, and HearstLab, the investment arm of Hearst Corporation.

Intella will use the funding to power a digital AI workforce across the Arabic-speaking world, while doubling down on R&D, product expansion, and regional hiring to bring its vision to life.

Established in 2021 by CEO Nour Taher and CTO Omar Mansour, Intella became a leader in Arabic speech services, offering enterprise-grade transcription, analytics, and AI-powered customer engagement tools tailored to over 25 dialects.

Its proprietary speech-to-text models achieved a global record accuracy of 95.73%, allowing businesses to move beyond generic AI and deliver localized, human-like conversations at scale.

Intella’s portfolio of enterprises across the MENA region covers diverse sectors, including finance, telecommunications, and government.

In 2024, the company more than doubled its revenue, setting a track to 7x growth in 2025.

Robin Voogd, Head of Middle East Investments, Prosus Ventures, commented: “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.”

He added: “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.”

Under a partnership with Jumia, Intella announced Ziila, its Arabic-born digital human, to secure a new voice-ordering feature for Jumia customers.

Ziila will be integrated with the intellaCX analytics product to offer a complete product suite that enables enterprises to analyze conversations and build next-generation, voice-based customer experiences.

Meanwhile, intella will utilize the investments to fuel its regional expansion plans market leadership and scale its go-to-market teams in Egypt and Saudi Arabia to meet the surging demand from the finance, telecommunications, and government sectors.