aiXplain announced a $6.5M pre-Series A round to simplify the process of building AI agents and globalize the impact of AI innovation. Wa’ed Ventures, a $500 million Saudi Arabian venture capital fund backed by Aramco led the round. Prominent angel investors like Osama Elkady, CEO and Co-founder of Incorta and global business expert Kane Minkus also participated in the round.
This brings the total funding raised by the company since being founded to $16.5 million, with notable U.S. based firms Transform VC and Calibrate VC having backed the company’s seed round last year.
Businesses around the world are looking to leverage AI for operational and decision-making use cases in the form of AI agents, systems with domain intelligence and the ability to operate autonomously on a user’s behalf. For most companies, building AI agents is out of reach due to the complexity, cost, resources and talent required across the development process. For others, they lack localized tools to optimize AI capabilities for their region or language. aiXplain is closing these gaps with an AI development platform for developers and non-technical users which “agentifies” tens of thousands of AI assets to harness their power via simple language prompts instead of lines of code.
“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,” said Hassan Sawaf, founder and CEO of aiXplain and former AI Director at Meta, Amazon and eBay. “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.”
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, 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.
“Hassan and his team deeply understand the global disparity in AI access and the potentially damaging effects of leaving this gap unaddressed,” said Fahad Alidi, Managing Director and CEO at Wa’ed Ventures. “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.”
An example of this vision in practice is Bel Esprit, an agentic AI application designed for non-technical users to create more sophisticated AI solutions with a natural language prompt. Currently available in open beta, it acts as an “agent of agents” by combining, organizing, and executing AI assets and tasks. It understands and decomposes complex queries, selects optimal AI models and tools for specific tasks and use cases, and builds end-to-end pipelines to create cohesive AI solutions.
