DXwand, a Dubai-based AI startup, has secured $4 million in Series A funding led by Shorooq Partners and Algebra Ventures. 

The funding round, held in January 2024, was also attended by the Dubai Future District Fund, an existing investor in the startup. With the new investments, the startup aims to strengthen its position in the MENA region and accelerate research and development in general AI, data mining, and omnichannel conversational AI within the region.

CEO Ahmed Mahmoud, who previously served as a Solutions Specialist for data and AI enterprise sales at Microsoft, founded DXwand five years ago. With his extensive experience in the region, Ahmed discovered that conversational AI and broader AI technologies were not fully matured and developed in the Middle East. He explained, “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 realisation of a business opportunity prompted me to resign from Microsoft and establish DXwand to address this gap.”

Sharing his vision for DXwand, Ahmed said, "Our primary focus was building an AI solution that works for Arabic dialects, which are very complex and sophisticated. Even Egypt has more than seven or eight spoken dialects. That helped us to work well in this region for the areas we support. Yet, this value by itself becomes more sophisticated wherever we go to more clients because those businesses require not just something to understand the language, but they also wanted something easier to onboard. At that time, natural language understanding solutions required a lot of effort in labelling the data, and working on labelling such data is a huge set of time and effort required by businesses for us to do."

Prior to this, the startup secured a seed funding round of $150,000 from investors in Qatar and Egypt.