Intella Secures $12.5 Million Series A Led by Prosus to Scale Arabic Speech AI Across MENA
Intella, a leading provider of Arabic speech intelligence solutions, has closed a $12.5 million oversubscribed Series A funding round, led by global investor Prosus, with participation from 500 Global, Wa’ed Ventures, Hala Ventures, Idrisi Ventures, and HearstLab, the investment arm of Hearst Corporation.
The new capital will accelerate Intella’s mission to advance AI technologies tailored to Arabic dialects, expand enterprise capabilities, and drive regional growth. The company plans to invest heavily in R&D, expand its product portfolio, and scale hiring across key markets in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Founded in 2021 by CEO Nour Taher and CTO Omar Mansour, Intella has established itself as a market leader in Arabic speech services, supporting more than 25 dialects. Its proprietary speech-to-text models have achieved a record accuracy of 95.73%, powering enterprise-grade transcription, analytics, and AI-driven customer engagement tools.
“From day one, our vision has been to bridge the gap between global AI advancements and the Arabic-speaking world,” said Nour Taher, Co-founder and CEO of Intella. “This investment from Prosus validates our technology and strengthens our ability to help enterprises transform customer conversations into strategic assets.”
Co-founder and CTO Omar Mansour added: “Our models already set the benchmark for Arabic accuracy. With this funding, we are focused on building intelligent, Arabic-first conversational agents capable of multi-turn dialogue and contextual understanding.”
The Arabic language landscape poses unique challenges due to its fragmented nature, with more than 25 dialects and limited availability of dialect-specific training data. Intella’s localized, data-driven approach has positioned it as a pioneer in addressing these complexities, unlocking new opportunities for AI-powered applications across finance, telecommunications, and government sectors.
Demonstrating its commercial momentum, Intella recently introduced Ziila, its first Arabic-born digital human, in partnership with Jumia, Africa’s largest e-commerce platform. Ziila now powers Jumia’s new voice-ordering feature, showcasing Intella’s ability to handle complex dialects in live customer environments.
Robin Voogd, Head of Middle East Investments at Prosus Ventures, commented: “Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages globally, yet AI models in the region have historically lagged due to linguistic complexity. Intella is solving this challenge with groundbreaking technology, and we are excited to support its mission to build AI locally for the Arabic-speaking world.”
Intella more than doubled its revenue in 2024 and is on track for sevenfold growth in 2025. Including the latest round, the company has raised over $16.9 million in funding to date.
