Saudi Arabia’s Sawt, an artificial intelligence voice technology startup, has completed a SAR 3.75 million pre-seed funding round led by technology investor T2 and STV’s recently launched dedicated fund for artificial intelligence ventures. Founded in 2024 by entrepreneur Abdulmalik Al-Saeed, the Riyadh-based company develops Arabic-native voice models aimed at automating customer support, bookings, and sales in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. The new investment will be used to enhance the technical infrastructure, expand the team, and further develop Sawt’s proprietary Arabic conversational models.
The platform, built entirely in Saudi Arabia, enables businesses to operate customer service channels with natural-sounding, always-available artificial intelligence agents that can handle interactions in colloquial Arabic. In its first two months, Sawt has powered hundreds of thousands of voice interactions and served dozens of businesses, demonstrating rapid adoption. The startup estimates the GCC call center automation market at between several hundred million and over a billion USD, reflecting an immense growth opportunity for regional language artificial intelligence solutions.
The funding comes amidst a flurry of artificial intelligence activity in Saudi Arabia’s startup ecosystem, where Arabic-first platforms for customer care and call centers have attracted significant investor interest. Earlier in the month, two other Riyadh-based ventures, Lucidya and Wittify.ai, closed major funding rounds focused on customer experience and conversational artificial intelligence for Arabic speakers. With demand increasing for robust Arabic voice solutions capable of handling large-scale, real-world dialogues, Sawt’s success points to Saudi Arabia’s emergence as a hotbed for indigenous artificial intelligence innovations tailored to the region’s linguistic and cultural needs.
