Sawt
Riyadh-based voice AI company whose agents handle customer support, booking and sales calls for businesses. It raised a USD 1 million pre-seed round led by T2 and STV in July 2025.
Industry: Customer service AI | Location: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | Founded: 2024 | Total Funding: USD 1M
About Sawt
Sawt is a Riyadh-based voice AI company that builds AI agents able to take and make phone calls for businesses. Its platform handles customer support, bookings and sales conversations around the clock, aiming to reduce long waiting times and repetitive queries in call centres. The company focuses on Arabic-native voice models for the Gulf market and says it develops them in Saudi Arabia. Sawt was founded in 2024. Coverage by Wamda and others names Abdulmalik Al-Saeed as co-founder and chief executive; he previously headed the newsroom of the Saudi podcasting platform Thmanyah. Bridgemena lists Khaled Aljuraywi and Basim Al-Harbi as his co-founders. In July 2025 the company announced a one million dollar (SAR 3.75 million) round. Most outlets, including Wamda and Enterprise, described it as a pre-seed, while Bridgemena called it a seed round. It was led by T2 and by STV, the Riyadh-based venture firm, through its newly created Emerging Tech and AI Fund. It was the first investment made from that fund, which is backed by Google. The company said it would use the money to develop Arabic-native voice models, grow its team and scale its infrastructure. At the time of the announcement Sawt said that within two months of launching it had served dozens of businesses and powered hundreds of thousands of voice interactions. These figures are company-reported. An STV partner quoted in the announcement projected the GCC market for AI call-centre automation at between 800 million and 1.2 billion dollars, a forecast made by the investor rather than an independent estimate. The fund behind Sawt is a roughly 100 million dollar vehicle focused on AI-native startups in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2026 it drew commitments from Saudi Awwal Bank and, in September, from Arcapita, alongside Google, semi-sovereign entities and endowments. Sawt is one of four portfolio companies the fund has named so far, together with Clarity, Signit and Stream. No later rounds, revenue figures or named customers have been published.
Leadership
- Abdulmalik Al-Saeed, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer