KSA-Based Wittify.ai Wraps Up US$1.5 Million Pre-Seed

Riyadh-based conversational artificial intelligence (AI) startup Wittify.ai has secured US$1.5 million in pre-seed funding from a syndicate of Saudi angel investors and business leaders to accelerate its mission of building Arabic-first conversational AI solutions for enterprises across the region. 

The fresh funding will go towards completing product development, advancing the platform’s beta launch, and driving go-to-market efforts across the MENA and GCC regions. The company is also looking to expand its engineering, product, and operations teams. 

Founded by Nader El-Batrawi and Sarah AlHumoud in KSA in 2024, Wittify.ai helps businesses create AI-powered voice, chat, and omnichannel assistants that support more than 25 Arabic dialects. Its no-code platform integrates seamlessly with websites, social media platforms, customer relationship management systems, and call centers, providing AI tools with native Arabic speech technology. Wittify.ai's platform is already live in beta, allowing businesses to build AI agents for voice, text, or multichannel interactions, integrated across digital platforms. 

While the broader AI conversation often centers on English-language capabilities, the co-founders told Inc. Arabia that Wittify.ai is finding strong and growing demand for conversational Arabic AI across multiple sectors. “First, Wittify.ai is working closely with enterprise and government clients on customized solutions, including call center automation and multimodal AI agents that combine voice and text," El-Batrawi, CEO of Wittify.ai, shared. "The demand has been substantial. What’s been most surprising is the level of urgency and maturity we’re seeing from traditional public service entities, where digital transformation is no longer a future goal, it’s a current priority, and Arabic-first AI is seen as a core enabler."

For Wittify.ai, being based in the region gives it a clear advantage—Arabic’s complexity isn’t a barrier, it’s the foundation of its business. “The biggest misconception we see from international players is treating Arabic as a single language,” AlHumoud, Chief AI Officer of Wittify.ai, noted. “The truth is, Arabic is more like 25 different languages, each tied to a different country, with over 66 dialectal variations in total. While most global models focus on modern standard Arabic (MSA), we’re going deeper into the natural, spoken Arabic that people actually use in everyday conversations.” 

That depth has come with its own set of challenges, particularly with the dearth of data around Arabic dialects. “The hardest challenge by far is the lack of high-quality, dialect-specific training data, especially for speech,” AlHumoud explained. “That’s why we’ve made a strategic investment in building our own datasets from scratch, working with voice artists, studio teams, annotators, and quality assurance (QA) specialists across the region. It takes hundreds of hours of curated, high-fidelity recordings for each dialect to train text-to-speech (TTS) models, and thousands of hours for robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems.” 

In terms of prioritizing which dialects to tackle next, Wittify.ai's roadmap is shaped by market needs. “Since we’re headquartered in Saudi Arabia with offices in Egypt and the UAE, our primary focus is on GCC dialects and Egyptian Arabic," AlHumoud added. "But we’ve designed our architecture to scale to more dialects over time based on both demand and strategic opportunity."

Wittify.ai co-founders Sarah AlHumoud and Nader El-Batrawi. Image courtesy Wittify.ai.

Beyond government and large enterprises, Wittify.ai is also finding traction with small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs). “These businesses recognize that AI agents are capable of understanding emotion, speaking multiple languages, taking real actions, and automating tasks, [delivering] enterprise-grade service at a fraction of the cost,” El-Batrawi explained. “That’s why we have developed Wittify.ai, tailored for tech, retail, and real estate sectors, enabling small and mid-sized businesses to build and deploy their own AI agents without technical complexity or code.” 

Looking beyond Wittify.ai's own roadmap, El-Batrawi is optimistic about the wider AI ecosystem in the GCC. “It’s a very exciting time for AI in the GCC," he said. "The energy is real, and the region is moving fast. Governments are investing heavily, enterprises are becoming AI-first, and public interest is at an all-time high." But he also issued a word of caution to aspiring founders. “But with that excitement comes risk. My advice to founders: be careful where you build. Right now, B2C general-purpose AI is a dangerous space, the top platforms (Apple, Google, OpenAI, etc.) are giving away world-class capabilities for free, fully integrated into operating systems and apps. Competing there is nearly impossible without massive resources.” 

Instead, he sees the opportunity clearly in the B2B space. “The real opportunity is in B2B AI, building localized, enterprise-grade solutions with regional integrations, local data hosting, and strong privacy controls. That’s where regional startups can truly shine and outcompete international players, especially when it comes to Arabic language, cultural context, and regulatory alignment,” El-Batrawi concluded. 

Pictured in the lead image is Wittify.ai co-founders Sarah AlHumoud and Nader El-Batrawi. Image courtesy Wittify.ai.