Afridigest Executive Brief: Lost in translation
Strategic Intelligence for Senior Executives | Week 36: Aug 31 - Sep 6, 2025
The Afridigest Executive Brief delivers essential intelligence to busy executives.
To those who shared feedback on the format last week: Thanks & you’ll notice some changes this week. Let me know your thoughts on the new News Radar axes. 🙏🏽
A summary of this week’s key trends:
• Arabic language AI capturing global investor attention
• Cross-border fintech M&A facing execution hurdles
• Private credit emerging as key growth capital alternative
Deal of the Week
🇪🇬 Intella, an Egypt-originating speech tech company specializing in Arabic voice AI transcription, raised a $12.5M Series A led by Naspers’ subsidiary Prosus (one of the largest tech investors globally), with participation from 500 Global, Wa’ed Ventures (Saudi Aramco), Hala Ventures, Idrisi Ventures, and HearstLab.
About Intella: Founded in 2021, Intella has emerged as the market leader in Arabic speech intelligence, offering enterprise-grade transcription, analytics, and AI-powered customer engagement tools for more than 25 dialects.
Its proprietary speech-to-text models have achieved record Arabic language accuracy of ~96% (surpassing industry giants like Google and IBM Watson), enabling businesses to deliver localized, human-like conversations at scale. The round will fund R&D and product expansion, particularly the continued rollout of Ziila, the company’s Arabic-native conversational AI agent.
Key personalities:
Nour Taher, Co-Founder & CEO
Omar Mansour, Co-Founder & CTO
Robin Voogd, Head of Middle East Investments, Prosus Ventures
In the Founder’s words: "From day one, our vision has been to bridge the gap between global AI advancements and the Arabic-speaking world. This funding from Prosus, a powerhouse investor with deep operational expertise, 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
In the Investor’s words: "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. Intella is rewriting the story of Arabic AI models, which have historically underperformed due to phonetic complexity and data scarcity." — Robin Voogd
Go deeper: Intella’s evolution from on-demand market research to the market leader in Arabic speech intelligence has been exciting to watch.
Afridigest previously covered the startup in Week 13 2022 when it was “a digital market research platform” that leveraged AI and in Week 40 2023 when it found a niche in “AI-powered chatbots and Arabic-language voice transcription technology” and relocated its HQ to Saudi Arabia.
The company’s funding progression is an interesting indication of the perceived market potential of Arabic-language AI: $1M seed (2022) → $3.4M pre-Series A (2023) → oversubscribed $12.5M Series A (2025).
See also: Week 34’s Deal of the Week
Deal Digest
$47M in new funding to African startups was announced this week. Here’s the full list: