Pandu Sjahrir Leads Initial Funding for Local AI Startup Pensieve

Artificial intelligence platform developer startup “Pensieve” announced the acquisition of angel round funding 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 who were not identified. This funding round was driven by revenue growth and a focus on building technology products going forward.

In less than a year after being founded, Pensieve products have been used by various agencies and organizations. Pensieve income is also expected to continue to increase in 2022.

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).

Their mission is to empower large-scale organizations and enterprises to transform through AI-powered software. Farina believes that many organizations are still not able to use their data optimally.

“We are building an AI-based operational platform that is able to create better workflows and decision-making in various large-scale organizations,” explained Farina.

Huge Potential to be Grasped

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 and more to the country and is able to become a large company that can expand in Southeast Asia,” said Pandu Sjahrir.

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

AI Startups from Indonesia

A number of startups from local founders have come up with AI-based solutions for different needs. 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 funded 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.

At a more basic level, AI technology has indeed been widely implemented to streamline a company’s business processes – especially digital. Take, for example, fintech platforms that use AI technology in the form of machine learning to perform fraud detection.

With the emergence of many startups in this category, the hope is of course the creation of a smart technology ecosystem that can provide many benefits for improving the welfare of the wider community through various efficiencies that are presented.