Egypt-Born WideBot Raises $3m Pre-Series A to Build Arabic LLM 'AQL' in Saudi Arabia
Arabic conversational-AI firm WideBot has raised a $3 million pre-Series A round to develop its locally hosted Arabic large language model.
WideBot, the Arabic conversational-AI company, has raised $3 million in a pre-Series A round led by Keheilan Asset Management, with participation from Al Wafra II, Enza Capital, DisrupTech Ventures, Den VC and SparkLabs Ventures.
The funding will accelerate development of WideBot's proprietary Arabic large language model, AQL, which it says is hosted on local cloud servers in Saudi Arabia and tuned to understand dialects and accents across the Arab world.
WideBot, which originally launched in Cairo and has moved operations to Riyadh, says it serves hundreds of clients across a dozen countries, including the Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah and the Egyptian Tax Portal.
The raise reflects intensifying regional investment in Arabic-native AI models and infrastructure.