Intella Raises USD 12.5M Series A to Scale Arabic AI Across MENA

Intella, a pioneer in Arabic speech intelligence, has raised USD 12.5 million in a Series A round led by Prosus, with additional participation from 500 Global, Wa’ed Ventures, Hala Ventures, Idrisi Ventures, and HearstLab.

Founded in 2021 by CEO Nour Taher and CTO Omar Mansour, Intella builds Arabic-first AI models designed to meet the needs of enterprises across the MENA region. Its solutions span speech recognition, transcription, analytics, and AI-powered customer engagement, covering more than 25 Arabic dialects.

Expanding Capabilities and Regional Presence

The new funding will fuel R&D, product expansion, and regional hiring, strengthening Intella’s market position and accelerating its mission to build a digital AI workforce across the Arabic-speaking world.
According to Taher:

“From day one, our vision has been to bridge the gap between global AI advancements and the Arabic-speaking world. This investment allows us to accelerate our goal of turning enterprise conversations into valuable strategic assets.”

Product Innovation: Ziila and Beyond

Intella recently launched Ziila, an Arabic-born conversational AI agent, in partnership with Jumia, enabling voice-ordering capabilities that adapt to complex dialects. Alongside Ziila, the company is rolling out intellaCX, an analytics tool designed to help enterprises extract insights from customer interactions and build richer, voice-driven experiences.

Regional Growth Strategy

With demand surging from sectors such as finance, telecom, and government, Intella plans to scale its commercial teams in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, while investing heavily in improving dialectal accuracy and natural language understanding. These steps are intended to secure Intella’s position as the go-to provider of Arabic-first AI solutions across the MENA region.