Cairo-based artificial intelligence startup Nanovate has secured $2 million in pre-seed funding from a group of angel investors, nine months after its founding by Nancy Madbouly and Ahmed Gamal. The round positions the company to accelerate its vision of Arabic-first AI—technology built natively for the language, culture, and workflows of businesses across the Middle East and North Africa.
Nanovate develops end-to-end Arabic AI, combining advanced voice and chat agents, automation layers, and bespoke applications into a single stack. Unlike generic, English-trained systems retrofitted for Arabic, the company’s models are trained to handle 22 Arabic dialects, capturing the nuance of everyday speech across the region. The startup is backed by MINT Incubator by EG Bank and the Raya FutureTECH Accelerator, giving it access to early enterprise pilots and go-to-market support.
With fresh capital, Nanovate plans to widen its footprint beyond Egypt with an immediate focus on Saudi Arabia and the UAE—two of the region’s most active digital economies. Product priorities include deeper integrations with CRMs, ERPs, and common business tools so customers can plug AI into existing operations without heavy lift. The company will also invest in R&D and expand its team across engineering, applied research, and enterprise delivery.
As part of the funding milestone, Nanovate unveiled the beta of its no-code AI dashboard, a self-service platform that lets companies build Arabic chat agents without writing a line of code. The dashboard blends language understanding, real-time speech and emotion AI, and workflow automation—allowing a retailer, bank, or logistics operator to stand up an agent that greets customers in their dialect, senses frustration or intent, and triggers actions across internal systems. For enterprises, that means faster deployments, consistent customer experiences, and tangible savings in support and back-office operations.
“This isn’t just another AI startup—it’s a movement to put Arabic at the center of global innovation,” said Ahmed Gamal, co-founder and CEO. “We’re building technology that understands us, speaks like us, and works for our region. With this round, we’re ready to take Arabic AI to a whole new level.”
Under the hood, Nanovate has developed its own large language models (LLMs) tuned for Arabic morphology, script variability, and code-switching—an everyday reality in MENA where users blend Arabic with English or French terms. That linguistic fidelity is complemented by sector-specific training for industries such as financial services, retail, logistics, healthcare, and public services. The aim is to move beyond chatbot novelty toward production-grade, localized AI infrastructure that can handle compliance, sentiment, and task completion with enterprise-level reliability.
The timing is favourable. Across MENA, organizations are racing to automate service centers, digitize onboarding, and personalize customer engagement—yet many struggle with models that miss context or falter on dialect. By centering Arabic from day one, Nanovate is betting it can deliver higher accuracy, faster time-to-value, and better user trust than generalized systems.
