Our Southeast Asia team have advised Singapore based Pencil (Pencil Technologies) on its recently completed series seed funding round. The round was led by Singapore VC Wavemaker Partners and supported by SG Innovate.

Pencil is a creative AI company that uses AI pattern detection to help creative and media teams generate content at speed and scale. Their software platform helps companies and agencies produce the volume of personalised content needed for modern digital advertising campaigns.

Creative teams can brief the Pencil platform and then review the generated content. Feedback from the creatives, in the form of approvals or edits, is used to train and further refine the AI. In turn, the AI provides feedback to the creatives, suggesting whether generated content is likely to be effective, differentiated and “on brand”.

Pencil Founder Will Hanschell said, Kindrik Partners were instrumental to a fast and favourable outcome on the round. As first-time founders, we relied on their partnership not only for support with the necessary documentation, but for advice on standard processes and critical regional context on terms.

The funding will be used to grow the company’s engineering and customer support teams, increase the depth of the proprietary datasets, and further refine the underlying technology.Pencil is a great example of the recent trend in VC investment preferences towards deep tech platforms, particularly AI and machine learning. Check out our related blog post for more on VC trends emerging in the first half of 2019.