Prosus Ventures announced that it has led a $12.5 million Series A funding round in Intella. Intella has established itself as a market leader in dialectal Arabic speech intelligence. This area holds considerable potential due to the linguistic diversity and complexity of the Arab world. The funding round also saw participation from several notable investors, including 500 Global, Waed Ventures, Hala Ventures, Idrisi Ventures, and HearstLab, the investment branch of Hearst Corporation. As a result of this infusion of capital, Intella’s total funding now stands at approximately $16.9 million.
The primary goal of this investment is to accelerate Intella’s mission to develop a robust artificial intelligence workforce tailored for the Arabic-speaking regions. With these new resources, the company plans to deepen its research and development efforts, expand its product offerings, and hire talented professionals across the region to bring its innovative vision closer to reality.
Founded in 2021 by CEO Nour Taher and CTO Omar Mansour, Intella has quickly risen to prominence by providing advanced Arabic speech services. Its offerings include enterprise-grade transcription, sophisticated analytics, and AI-powered customer engagement tools that are uniquely tailored to more than 25 dialects spoken across the Arab world.
One of the most impressive aspects of Intella’s technology is its proprietary speech-to-text models, which have achieved a record accuracy rate of 95.73%. This high level of precision enables businesses to go beyond generic AI solutions and deliver more localized, human-like conversations at scale. This is especially critical in the Arab world, where linguistic diversity can pose significant challenges for AI systems. Intella’s solutions enable enterprises to communicate effectively in their native languages, fostering improved customer interactions and trust.
With its impressive accuracy across a wide range of Arabic dialects and a clear roadmap towards integrating digital virtual agents, Intella is redefining how businesses in the Middle East and North Africa engage with their customers. The company’s success is built on the understanding that language and voice data will be the key competitive advantages for AI in the coming years. Their portfolio reflects this belief, with investments in companies like Luzia and Zapia, which are revolutionizing digital assistance and enabling millions to interact with AI in more natural, localized ways.
In the healthcare sector, investments in companies like Corti and Voa demonstrate how conversational AI can help doctors and healthcare providers deliver faster and more accurate care. These examples illustrate how specialization and localization in AI tools can unlock new efficiencies across various industries, transforming the way people work, transact, and access essential services.
Intella’s expansion into the Arabic-speaking market represents a crucial extension of this broader thesis. Given the large and linguistically diverse population, the company’s localized approach makes it a natural complement to Prosus’ broader ecosystem, which spans Europe, Latin America, and India. The wider aim is to simplify the often fragmented digital landscape, creating seamless experiences for billions of consumers engaging in food delivery, fintech, e-commerce, and other services.
This latest investment also follows a series of strategic moves by Prosus to strengthen its presence in the Middle East, supporting local innovation through investments in startups like Thndr, Zest Equity, Zypl, and Qeen.ai. Intella already serves a growing roster of enterprise clients across finance, telecommunications, and government sectors. The company reported more than doubling its revenue in 2024 and is on track to achieve seven times growth in 2025.
Looking ahead, Intella plans to use this new funding round to develop its enterprise capabilities further, accelerate expansion across the MENA region, and push the boundaries of what’s possible with Arabic-first AI. Recognizing that Arabic is not a monolithic language—where Modern Standard Arabic is seldom used in daily speech—the company specializes in understanding and leveraging regional dialects. This localized data-driven approach positions Intella as a foundational layer for voice and text applications in Arabic.
Its impact can already be seen through its pioneering partnership with Jumia, Africa’s biggest e-commerce platform. Together, they launched Ziila, an Arabic digital human powered by Intella’s voice technology, which enables voice ordering for Jumia’s customers. This initiative exemplifies how innovative technology can simplify shopping experiences and enhance everyday life, aligning with Prosus’ core mission of building interconnected ecosystems where technology genuinely makes a difference in people’s daily transactions and interactions.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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.”
Robin Voogd, Head of Middle East Investments, Prosus Ventures
“From day one, our vision has been to bridge the gap between global AI advancements and the Arabic-speaking world. This funding from Prosus Ventures, 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.”
Nour Taher, Co-founder and CEO of Intella
“This round is a catalyst for our product roadmap. 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.”
Omar Mansour, Co-founder and CTO of Intella
