Riyadh – Sharikat Mubasher: Saudi Arabia’s Wa’ed Ventures, backed by Aramco, has led the latest pre-Series A funding of aiXplain, a California-based AI platform, a round also included participation from several strategic angel investors.
The startup’s subsidiary in Saudi Arabia will function as the company’s headquarters in the MENA region to drive growth in the Kingdom, according to a recent press release. Wa’ed Ventures will support localizing the company’s AI solutions in the Kingdom, as part of the region’s plan to position itself as the next global AI hub.
aiXplain aims to use the funding to back the rollout of its agentic tooling solutions and simplify the process of building AI agents for local businesses with limited technical resources.
The startup has been working with several regional AI organizations to build an alliance for Arabic LLM development, which will debut later this year. Since its inception in 2020, aiXplain has raised a total of $16.5 million.
Commenting on this, Hassan Sawaf, Founder & CEO of aiXplain said: “Building practical AI solutions shouldn’t be reserved for big tech companies with extensive AI resources. There are so many AI assets available today—models, datasets, pipelines—but very little infrastructure making these assets readily accessible. aiXplan is changing that. AI has the potential to make a tangible difference for businesses around the world, and our latest financing will help us bring this vision to life.”
Fahad Alidi, Managing Director and CEO at Wa’ed Ventures adds: “Hassan and his team deeply understand the global disparity in AI access and the potentially damaging effects of leaving this gap unaddressed. aiXplain has already helped close the AI innovation gap in the MENA region, and we see significant potential for the company to localize its solutions in the Kingdom.”
Founded in 2020, aiXplain got its start as the innovation partner for organizations such as The Saudi Data & AI Authority (SDAIA) to accelerate AI innovation in the Gulf region. The company now works with businesses across the world to build AI solutions efficiently, as well as fine-tune and benchmark AI models.
Users can leverage aiXplain's custom-built AI assets, and third-party assets from OpenAI, Google, AWS, Azure, and dozens of other AI technology providers. With a platform and marketplace that provides access and support for 40,000+ AI assets across more than 55 functions, pipelines, and tools, aiXplain is the most language-rich hub for AI assets in the world and one of the most expansive.
