• Amman-based AI startup Xina AI has raised $1 million in a Seed round, led by Jordanian angel investors.

• Founded in August 2020 by Sari Hweitat, Xina is an Arabic interactive voice assistant (IVA) and a chatbot that utilises AI and natural language understanding to automate customer support functions.

• The new investment will support Xina’s expansion plans across the region, in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE, as well as strengthen its intellectual property development. 

Press release: 

Xina AI, an Arabic Conversational AI platform that automates customer support queries, announced today it has raised $1 million in the Seed round. The investment is to support expansion across the region and further strengthen Xina’s intellectual property development. 

After a successful pilot in Jordan, Xina plans to expand into the Saudi, UAE and Qatari market through their regional investors’ support as well as strategic alliances and partnerships. In order to boost its intellectual property system, Xina aims to improve the algorithm’s accuracy, increase the vernacular languages of Arabic from the Mena region with a particular focus on Levant, Egyptian, GCC dialects, and provide our APIs for the Arabic developers’ community to enable them to develop their own use cases.

Commenting on the raised funding, Sari Hweitat, CEO and founder of Xina, confirms that “AI-based spending in the region will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 19 per cent.” He further noted that “the investment will put us on the map of Arabic conversational AI.” In fact, the tech and management team at Xina aims to spearhead the development of conversational Arabic through its use of AI, which helps to solve subtle variances in accents and dialects from one speaker to the next. Xina effectively relies on local linguistic and behavioural preferences to optimise the Arabic speaking customer experience. 

By disrupting the traditional customer support model business model, Xina’s new AI capabilities and machine-learning tools have the capacity to improve customer support in all forms at all times. In effect, Xina can help businesses promote customer retention and loyalty and, ultimately, boost sales revenues and profit.