EGYPT – DXwand, an omnichannel conversational AI and digital assistants tool, has announced the closed US$1 million in pre-Series A funding round to accelerate its growth across the Middle East, increase its market share, and accelerate its AI research to further differentiate its solutions on the market.
The funding round was headed by Huashan Capital, and with commitments from angel investors Mr Mohsen Abulleil and Mr Ahmed Bakeer.
US-based VC firm SOSV, the early investor in DXwand’s seed round, has also supported the due diligence and syndication of this financing round as part of its strong trust in the company’s future.
“Conversational interfaces are the future of user engagement and we think that the DXwand team is very well positioned thanks to their proprietary Arabic dialects NLP [Natural Language Processing] and personalised recommendations engines that set them apart from the rest of the competitors,” said Oscar Ramos, a general partner at SOSV.
The company’s AI-driven software automates text and voice conversations between customers and businesses in call centres, on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, or on a website.
DXwand’s AI tool understands slang in both Arabic and English and can extract insights from conversations and display them on dashboards for businesses to make instant, informed decisions to boost sales and growth, it said.
“What we liked about DXwand was that it provided a clear quantifiable value proposition to its clients — reducing customer service time by 70 per cent, greatly reducing the manpower needed, and driving up to three times higher customer engagement,” said David Chen of Huashan Capital.
“AI-powered customer services are blossoming across the globe in every customer-facing interaction, and we’re looking forward to supporting DXwand’s efforts to expand into the whole Mena region.”
Artificial intelligence will be the common theme in the top 10 technology trends in the next few years and these are expected to quicken breakthroughs across critical economic sectors and society, the Alibaba Damo Academy said earlier this year.
“With gaining more trust from various stakeholders to lead the AI services industry in Mena, and having been achieving 11X year-over-year growth, we look forward to propelling this success even more in the coming period,” said Ahmed Mahmoud, founder and chief executive at DXwand.
Total financing from venture capital funds in the Middle East rose 132 per cent to almost US$2 billion last year, with the total number of deals up 5 per cent to 410, according to data platform Magnitt.
The total funding value in the Mena region was driven by mega funding rounds such as Egypt’s Paymob and Saudi Arabia’s Hyperpay, whose rounds combined accounted for almost half of the amount raised in the month of May.
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