Soma AI thinks APAC marketers deserve better than ChatGPT

Marketers are drowning in AI tools, with a third of them saying that there are too many that do similar things but don’t connect to one another, according to a HubSpot report.

There’s AI for ad dashboards, brand tracking, competitor monitoring, and content generation, yet these spend too much time on admin rather than strategy.

A Singapore-based startup launching this week thinks it has a fix.

Soma AI founders Ian Chapman-Banks (left) and Cheryl Ng-Darshan / Photo credit: Soma AI

Soma AI is an AI-powered marketing intelligence platform designed to bring martech AI functions into a single workspace.

The platform brings together ad performance data across channels, including Meta, TikTok, Shopee, and Google Ads, offers brand intelligence and competitor research, and generates plain-language recommendations. It also does all this without requiring users to understand prompt engineering.

The company is bootstrapped with around US$100,000 in capital, a figure that stands out given the background of the startup’s co-founder and chief business officer Ian Chapman-Banks.

A veteran of Apple, Microsoft, and Motorola Asia Pacific, Chapman-Banks has led five major exits worth over US$4 billion in aggregate deal value. He also co-founded Singapore-based AI and digital behavior aggregation company Sqreem, a firm he brought to an exit late last year.

Through a mutual contact in the Sqreem investor network, he connected with Soma co-founder and CEO Cheryl Ng-Dharsan, a marketer with 22 years of experience in companies like retail AI company ViSenze and VC firm Alpha JWC Ventures.

The two founded Soma earlier this year. The idea grew out of Ng-Dharsan’s time at Alpha JWC Ventures, where part of her role involved mentoring marketing staff at portfolio companies that couldn’t afford senior talent. She wanted to find a way to scale that guidance without being physically present at every company.

“For Sqreem, we raised about US$50 million, and when we started, we had 250 engineers, and essentially, the two of us and a part-time CTO built a whole platform plus go-to-market for US$100,000,” Chapman-Banks told Tech in Asia. “It’s absolutely astonishing how the frontier models have changed the way that entrepreneurs think.”

Taking on LLMs

Soma is structured around four components.

Brand Hub captures a firm’s brand voice, its competitors, and customer personas, which are then used to ensure AI outputs have context and don’t provide generic advice.

Ads Intelligence, meanwhile, ingests data from Meta, TikTok, Shopee, and Google Ads, reconciles metrics across platforms that measure performance differently, and finds bottlenecks, without requiring the user to stitch together spreadsheets.

Domain expertise