Singapore-based creative AI platform bags $1.1m in seed funding

Pencil, a Singapore-based creative AI platform for digital advertising, raised roughly US$1.1 million in a seed funding round led by Wavemaker Partners, along with government-owned SGInnovate and talent investor Entrepreneur First.

The Pencil team / Photo source: Pencil

Pencil also credited National University of Singapore associate professor Min-Yen Kan and members of Xoogler Angels, an angel network of Google executives in Southeast Asia, as its investor-advisors.

With the investment, the startup plans to grow its engineering and customer success teams, expand its own datasets, and further develop its technology, according to a statement.

Pencil concurrently announced the launch of its first enterprise product: Studio, a creative platform for advertisers which can leverage AI to generate more personalized content faster. The company said that Studio uses computational power to experiment with a number of ideas, then picks the best ones through AI pattern detection.

The company also made the generation of content on Studio a collaborative effort between human and AI. Advertisers can brief the platform then review the technology’s generated content to train and refine the AI.

Founded in March 2018, Pencil said it has worked with the likes of personal care brand Pond’s, beauty chain Sephora’s Southeast Asia operations, and WPP media company Mindshare. It also claimed that a twofold improvement in advertising performance and a 10x reduction in time and cost would be possible with its technology.