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 Collection A funding.
UAE-based Shorooq Companions and Cairo-headquartered agency Algebra Ventures led the funding, with current investor Dubai Future District Fund additionally collaborating. The Collection A funding will help DXwand in increasing additional within the MENA area and speed up its analysis and growth efforts in generative AI, information mining, and omnichannel conversational AI throughout 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 know-how inside growth groups. Transitioning to the trade’s enterprise facet, Mahmoud labored at Vodafone after which Microsoft; in these roles, he engaged with shoppers to discover methods AI might improve productiveness and total consumer 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 the moment, I attempted to validate if we might construct AI fashions for spoken dialects within the area, however we encountered some challenges. The conclusion of a enterprise alternative prompted me to resign from Microsoft and set up DXwand to handle this hole.”
After going via 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 seek out product-market match and turn into worthwhile.
“Our major focus was constructing an AI resolution that works for Arabic dialects, that are very complicated and complicated — even Egypt had greater than seven or eight spoken dialects. And that helped us to work nicely on this area, for the areas we help,” the Microsoft alum stated within the interview. “But, this worth by itself will get extra sophistication wherever we go to extra shoppers as a result of these companies require not simply to have one thing to know the language, however additionally they needed one thing simpler to onboard, and at the moment, the pure language understanding options required plenty of efforts in labeling the info and dealing on labeling such knowledge is a large set of time and efforts that required companies for us to do.”
In 2021, the Egypt-born AI startup launched into a pivot, focusing on corporates and enterprises as a substitute of small companies because it directed its efforts towards information mining and retrieval augmented era (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 patrons to label knowledge manually. This strategy permits it to pre-label knowledge, facilitating sooner onboarding of extra shoppers and supporting subtle use instances, finally aiding enterprises in adoption.
Contemplate a situation 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 intention to automate customer support or gross sales over their digital channels — a job that sometimes includes manually labeling all that knowledge. Realistically, attaining that is no straightforward feat; many would possibly 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 job of guide knowledge labeling.
In a nutshell, DXwand’s AI-powered software program automates textual content and voice conversations between companies, their prospects, workers, and citizen-facing authorities companies. This performance spans numerous platforms, together with name facilities, Fb Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, and web sites. The platform claims to understand slang in each Arabic and English, extracting helpful insights from conversations and presenting them on dashboards for companies to make knowledgeable selections. In accordance with the startup, it offers analytical instruments and dashboards that provide 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 traders and $1 million pre-Collection A from the Dubai Future District Fund. This era coincided with the surge in curiosity and maturity of enormous language fashions. As these applied sciences grew to become extra sturdy, DXwand AI seized the chance to increase its choices and cater to the rising demand for such options amongst its shoppers.
“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 in addition constructing on prime 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. “Immediately, we now have some shoppers from Africa. So we began to leverage that as a result of it’s language agnostic, helps shoppers to onboard simply and clear up their issues.”
The chief govt highlighted that the chatbot platform caters to over 40 shoppers throughout the MENA area, spanning various sectors similar to healthcare, e-commerce, fintech, telecom, authorities, and authorized. Since its inception, the AI startup has facilitated over 5 million conversations and presently stands as a worthwhile entity, Mahmoud added. Relying on utilization volumes, shoppers 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 progress and underscoring the platform’s rising significance and adoption in a market the place AI platforms are few and much between.
Armed with this new funding, DXwand’s subsequent plans embody increasing throughout Africa and Saudi Arabia, Mahmoud shared 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 era, and forming alliances with know-how suppliers like telecom operators to determine significant partnerships throughout the communities it serves stay prime of thoughts for the startup, too.
