Pandu Sjahrir Leads the Seed Funding for a Local AI Startup "Pensieve"

The artificial intelligence platform "Pensieve" announced the angel funding round from a group of individual investors with an undisclosed amount. Pandu Sjahrir led this round, followed by a number of other angels from Indonesia, Singapore and Brunei Darussalam whom identity are yet to disclose.

The Pensieve solution is an AI-based workflow engine software to help government and corporate institutions optimize business performance with better decision making. The work process starts from data integration/management, implementation of the decision-making engine, to displaying recommendation results into an application that is easy for users to read.

Pensieve plans to use the funding to accelerate product development and expand its market in Southeast Asia. In less than a year, Pensieve has grown with teams in Indonesia, Singapore and India.

This startup was founded in 2021 by Farina Situmorang (CEO). The mission is to empower large-scale organizations and enterprises to transform through AI-powered software. Farina believes that many organizations still have difficulty to optimally use its data.

“We are building an AI-based operational platform to allow better workflows and decision-making in various large-scale organizations,” Farina said.

Huge potential on the way

According to Kearney's analysis, the application of artificial intelligence can have a significant overall impact on the operations of a business system. It is generally projected to increase 10 to 18 percent of GDP across Southeast Asia by 2030, equivalent to about $1 trillion. The data indicates that AI development and deployment is at an all-time high and Pensieve is poised to spearhead digital transformation in Southeast Asia.

"Pensieve has a very strong foundation and I feel very fortunate together with other angel investors to be able to participate in this angel round. I hope Pensieve can become a company that contributes more to the country and is able to become a large company to further expand in Southeast Asia," Pandu Sjahrir said.

Pensieve believes that there is huge opportunity in Southeast Asia. “We believe with more support for Pensieve's growth, we can help organizations in Southeast Asia who are facing the same problem and in need of use cases similar to the ones we have seen in Indonesia,” Farina added.

Indonesian based AI startups

A number of local founders have come up with AI-based solutions for different segments. Some of them have also received funding from investors. Take Datasaur, for example, a startup that focuses on providing data labeling services to help businesses develop more relevant and intuitive databases. This startup has been backed by Y Combinator, GDP Venture, and a number of other investors.

There is also Konvergen.ai, developing artificial intelligence technology for data capture needs – referring to the process of collecting data from paper or digital documents using optical character recognition (OCR) components. For more specific applications, there are Qlue and Nodeflux, the solutions help improve services in the public sector and present smart city-based solutions.

In a more basic level, AI technology has indeed been widely implemented to streamline a company's business processes – especially digital. For example, fintech platforms that use AI technology in the form of machine learning to perform fraud detection. With the rise of many startups in this segment, it is expected to create a smart technology ecosystem that can provide many benefits for improving the welfare of the wider community through various efficiencies.

–Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian