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 improvement efforts in generative AI, data 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 know-how inside improvement groups. Transitioning to the business’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 total consumer expertise.
At Microsoft, he recognized one thing apparent: Conversational AI and broader AI applied sciences weren’t absolutely 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 may construct AI fashions for spoken dialects within the area, however we encountered some challenges. The belief of a enterprise alternative prompted me to resign from Microsoft and set up DXwand to deal with this hole.”
After going by way of an accelerator in 2018, Mahmoud launched DXwand to offer 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 group quickly realized it wanted to modify enterprise fashions to search out product-market match and turn out to be worthwhile.
“Our major focus was constructing an AI answer 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 effectively on this area, for the areas we help,” the Microsoft alum mentioned within the interview. “But, this worth by itself will get extra sophistication wherever we go to extra purchasers 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 loads of efforts in labeling the information 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, concentrating on corporates and enterprises as a substitute of small companies because it directed its efforts towards data 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 data graph that eradicated the necessity for purchasers to label knowledge manually. This method permits it to pre-label knowledge, facilitating sooner onboarding of extra purchasers and supporting subtle use circumstances, in the end aiding enterprises in adoption.
Take into account a state of affairs the place an enterprise offers with an enormous 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 activity that sometimes entails manually labeling all that knowledge. Realistically, reaching that is no simple feat; many would possibly discover it impractical. That is the place data 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 activity 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 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 useful insights from conversations and presenting them on dashboards for companies to make knowledgeable choices. In keeping with the startup, it supplies analytical instruments and dashboards that supply insights into these conversations and rework 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 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 data mining, getting and leveraging particular options for particularly Arabic and different dialects. But additionally constructing on high of that data 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’ve got some purchasers from Africa. So we began to leverage that as a result of it’s language agnostic, helps purchasers to onboard simply and remedy their issues.”
The chief government 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 presently 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 progress and underscoring the platform’s growing significance and adoption in a market the place AI platforms are few and much between.
Armed with this new funding, DXwand’s subsequent plans embrace 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 data mining and retrieval augmented technology, and forming alliances with know-how suppliers like telecom operators to ascertain significant partnerships inside the communities it serves stay high of thoughts for the startup, too.
