DXwand raises $4M to scale its conversational AI platform for enterprises in MENA

DXwand, a Cairo- and Dubai-based startup that leverages conversational AI to assist companies within the Center East automate customer support and worker help, has raised $4 million in a Sequence A spherical.

UAE-based Shorooq Companions and Cairo-headquartered agency Algebra Ventures led the funding, with current investor Dubai Future District Fund additionally taking part. The Sequence A funding will help DXwand in increasing additional within the MENA area and speed up its analysis and improvement efforts in generative AI, information mining, and omnichannel conversational AI inside the area.

Earlier than founding DXwand, CEO Ahmed Mahmoud was employed at Microsoft, the place he led their knowledge and synthetic intelligence enterprise gross sales within the Gulf area and the Center East. His skilled journey started with an engineering background and dealing on software program and AI expertise inside improvement groups. Transitioning to the trade’s enterprise aspect, Mahmoud labored at Vodafone after which Microsoft; in these roles, he engaged with purchasers to discover methods AI may improve productiveness and general person expertise.

At Microsoft, he recognized one thing apparent: Conversational AI and broader AI applied sciences weren’t totally matured and developed within the Center East, as options from Silicon Valley didn’t cater to Arabic or different languages within the area. “At that time, I tried to validate if we could build AI models for spoken dialects in the region, but we encountered some challenges. The realization of a business opportunity prompted me to resign from Microsoft and establish DXwand to address this gap.”

After going by way of an accelerator in 2018, Mahmoud launched DXwand to supply small companies with a customer-centric chatbot tailor-made for gross sales over social media platforms. The agency initially secured seed funding of $150,000 from angels in Qatar and Egypt. Nonetheless, the staff quickly realized it wanted to change enterprise fashions to search out product-market match and turn into worthwhile.

“Our primary focus was building an AI solution that works for Arabic dialects, which are very complex and sophisticated — even Egypt had more than seven or eight spoken dialects. And that helped us to work well in this region, for the areas we support,” the Microsoft alum stated within the interview. “Yet, this value by itself gets more sophistication wherever we go to more clients because those businesses require not just to have something to understand the language, but they also wanted something easier to onboard, and at that time, the natural language understanding solutions required a lot of efforts in labeling the data and working on labeling such data is a huge set of time and efforts that required businesses for us to do.”

In 2021, the Egypt-born AI startup launched into a pivot, focusing on corporates and enterprises as an alternative of small companies because it directed its efforts towards information mining and retrieval augmented technology (RAG) domains. Again then, the excitement round massive language fashions hadn’t but taken off as they’ve now — and DXwand aimed to create a information graph that eradicated the necessity for purchasers to label knowledge manually. This strategy permits it to pre-label knowledge, facilitating sooner onboarding of extra purchasers and supporting refined use circumstances, finally aiding enterprises in adoption.

Take into account a state of affairs the place an enterprise offers with an unlimited repository of insurance policies and knowledge, sufficient to fill a room with PDFs. The problem arises once they goal to automate customer support or gross sales over their digital channels — a process that sometimes includes manually labeling all that knowledge. Realistically, attaining that is no straightforward feat; many may discover it impractical. That is the place information mining comes into play. With this functionality, such enterprises can enter their uncooked knowledge — and DXwand’s system takes care of the labeling by making a pre-labeled set and streamlining their processes to implement conversational experiences for his or her prospects or employees with out the painstaking process of guide knowledge labeling.

In a nutshell, DXwand’s AI-powered software program automates textual content and voice conversations between companies, their prospects, staff, and citizen-facing authorities companies. This performance spans varied platforms, together with name facilities, Fb Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, and web sites. The platform claims to grasp slang in each Arabic and English, extracting beneficial insights from conversations and presenting them on dashboards for companies to make knowledgeable choices. In keeping with the startup, it offers analytical instruments and dashboards that supply insights into these conversations and remodel them into leads and gross sales, enhancing buyer retention and acquisition.

To scale this mannequin within the Center East and Gulf areas, the startup took in extra investments between 2021 and 2022: $1.3 million in seed extension from SOSV and different buyers and $1 million pre-Sequence A from the Dubai Future District Fund. This era coincided with the surge in curiosity and maturity of huge language fashions. As these applied sciences grew to become extra strong, DXwand AI seized the chance to increase its choices and cater to the rising demand for such options amongst its purchasers.

We used these funds to help and speed up our investments in information mining, getting and leveraging particular options for particularly Arabic and different dialects. But additionally constructing on high of that information mining to make it work for any language and increase the corporate into different areas like in Africa and Europe,” Mahmoud, who runs the startup alongside co-founder Mahmoud Gomaa, remarked. “Today, we have some clients from Africa. So we started to leverage that because it’s language agnostic, helps clients to onboard easily and solve their problems.”

The chief govt highlighted that the chatbot platform caters to over 40 purchasers throughout the MENA area, spanning various sectors reminiscent of healthcare, e-commerce, fintech, telecom, authorities, and authorized. Since its inception, the AI startup has facilitated over 5 million conversations and at the moment stands as a worthwhile entity, Mahmoud added. Relying on utilization volumes, purchasers are charged yearly subscriptions between $50,000 and $400,000. Moreover, Mahmoud revealed that the corporate recorded over $5 million in annual recurring revenues in 2023, representing a 2x year-over-year development and underscoring the platform’s rising significance and adoption in a market the place AI platforms are few and much between.

DXwand’s subsequent plans embrace increasing throughout Africa and Saudi Arabia, Mahmoud shares on the decision, including that each areas maintain explicit significance within the startup’s technique. He additionally notes that accelerating analysis efforts, particularly in information mining and retrieval augmented technology, and forming alliances with expertise suppliers like telecom operators to determine significant partnerships inside the communities it serves stay high of thoughts, too.