Backing Sawt from STV’s Debut AI Fund: Building Arabic-Native Voice AI for the Enterprise

STV is co-leading the seed round of Sawt alongside T2, a leading communications company in Saudi Arabia with 12k+ enterprise and government clients. This marks the first investment from STV’s newly launched AI Fund, backed by Google and designed to support the next generation of AI-native startups across MENA.

Legacy call center solutions in the region have long struggled to keep pace with rising customer expectations. Outdated IVR trees, long wait times, and clunky agent handovers remain common pain points, especially in Arabic-speaking markets. At the same time, enterprises are spending more than ever on customer experience, but the underlying systems remain rigid, expensive, and poorly localized.

Sawt is changing that. From its early beginnings at UC Berkeley, Sawt has rapidly grown into an enterprise-grade AI company powering mission-critical voice solutions. Founded by Abdulmalik Alsaeed, Khaled AlJuraywi (ex-STVer), and Basim Alharbi, the company in a few months moved from prototype to product, and generated meaningful revenues.

We are proud to co-lead Sawt’s seed round through our newly launched AI Fund, alongside T2, a leading communications company in Saudi Arabia with 12k+ enterprise and government clients, as the company gears up for the next phase of growth. Through this partnership, Sawt will be able to accelerate distribution to capture the antiquated customer service market in Saudi Arabia and beyond.

This investment is the first from STV’s AI Fund, a dedicated vehicle for backing AI-native ventures in the region. The fund is backed by Google and reflects our long-term belief in the transformative potential of AI across MENA’s economy. Sawt embodies that vision: locally grounded, globally ambitious, and moving fast. We’re proud to back the team on this journey.