Saudi conversational AI startup Wittify.ai has raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding to build what it calls the next generation of Arabic-first AI agents. The round, backed by prominent angel investors and local business figures in Saudi Arabia, will support Wittify’s product development, regional expansion, and deep investment into Arabic-language technologies, as it looks to differentiate itself from global players through hyper-localised, dialect-aware systems.
Founded in 2024 by Nader El-Batrawi & Sarah AlHumoud and now operating out of Riyadh, Dubai, and Cairo, Wittify is positioning itself as a regional leader in Arabic conversational AI by going beyond basic language models. Its no-code platform enables businesses to deploy AI agents across digital and physical touchpoints, from websites and CRMs to phone systems and call centres, while delivering real business outcomes, not just chat transcripts. The agents can be configured as voice, text, or hybrid solutions, with built-in workflow execution and enterprise system integration.
What sets Wittify apart is not just its commercial interface, but the infrastructure behind it. Co-founder and CEO Dr. Sarah Al-Hamoud says the company is developing proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) engines tailored for the complexity of Arabic, including more than 25 dialects. “We’re not simply localising global models — we’re building native capabilities from the ground up,” she said. “By blending global model strengths with our proprietary stack, we can offer agents that are not only intelligent but culturally fluent and truly human-like.”
Wittify’s thesis is that customer-facing automation in the region has long been constrained by poor language understanding, clunky integrations, and off-the-shelf models that fail to capture the nuance of Arabic conversation.
Its platform, now live in beta, aims to change that by allowing enterprises to create agents that listen, act, and adapt in real time without needing deep technical teams to build them.
