The new funds will help accelerate the company’s expansion into Saudi Arabia amid a strong national push to position the country as the next global AI hub.
aiXplain, the California-based AI platform and leading provider of essential infrastructure for accelerated AI development, today announced that it has closed its $6.5M Pre-series A round led by Wa’ed Ventures, the $500 million Saudi venture capital fund backed by Aramco. A number of strategic angel investors 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.
The pre Series A fundraise further validates aiXplain’s mission to globalize the impact of AI innovation as the company plans to utilize the new funds to expedite the rollout of its agentic tooling solutions and simplify the process of building AI agents for local businesses with limited technical resources. Founded in 2020 in San Jose, aiXplain is a US-based AI software infrastructure company that has designed an integrated platform to simplify the creation, deployment, and management of AI solutions.
The company aims to democratize access to AI innovation by enabling the building of advanced AI solutions through natural language prompts for users with no coding background. This allows businesses to focus on maximizing operational efficiencies by accelerating the time and effort needed for integrating AI into large-scale operations. Within the first two years of commercialization, the company has secured global customers. Founded by Dr. Hassan Sawaf, who has over 25 years of experience in developing and deploying cutting-edge technologies at Meta, Amazon, and eBay.
“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 Dr. Hassan Sawaf. “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.”
“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.” To accelerate its entry to the Kingdom, AiXplain’s existing subsidiary in Saudi Arabia will function as the company’s MENA region’s headquarters. AiXplain has actively been working with over a dozen leading AI organizations across the region to build an alliance for Arabic large language model development, which is set to debut later this year.
Beyond the Kingdom, AiXplain currently works with businesses across the world to build AI solutions efficiently, as well as fine-tune and benchmark AI models. With 40,000+ AI models across more than 55 functions, pipelines and tools accessible through its platform, aiXplain is the most language-rich hub for AI assets in the world, and one of the most expansive. Through its investment, Wa’ed ventures will support the localization of the company’s AI solutions in the Kingdom, amid strong national initiatives to position the country as the next global AI hub. A National Data and Artificial Intelligence Strategy (NSDAI) was established in 2020 to attract investments in data and AI expected to reach $19 billion in value for the Kingdom by 2030.
