Sinar Mas Group Leads Series B+ Funding for AI Startup 6Estates

Singapore-based AI-based document processing technology startup, 6Estates, has successfully secured series B+ funding of $6.2 million or equivalent to 89 billion Rupiah. The Sinar Mas Group is leading the funding round, followed by Enterprise Singapore (SEEDS Capital) and Farquhar VC.

In the previous Series B funding round in early 2019, the company received an investment led by GDP Venture with the participation of Central Capital Venture — BCA’s corporate venture.

6Estates itself has also collaborated with major groups in Southeast Asia to implement integrated solutions including risk assessment, fraud detection, customer analysis, and cross-selling capabilities.

Founded in 2014, 6Estates focuses on developing Multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP), Knowledge Graph (KG), and Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) technologies to understand business documents.

The platform offers AI-based document processing solutions in the fintech sector, with the aim of automating and simplifying operational processes.

Several leading regional financial institutions are already using this solution in trade finance and credit scoring through a customizable Intelligent Document Processing to perform semantic correlation analysis, one step ahead of traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology.

Focus On Product Development

The company is said to be focusing fresh funds from this funding round for the development of its Intelligent Document Processing function in sectors such as banking and finance, trade, shipping, logistics, and insurance across Southeast Asia.

Doc Automize is a company-managed SaaS platform to help processing unstructured documents, reduce human dependency, and scale business exponentially.

In addition, this platform also offers several other solutions, such as Market Innovation Knowledge Advisor (MIKA), an artificial intelligence-based data solution that can be used to identify each attribute of product sales.

Then, there is Financial Analysis Automation to automate manual processes and financial document analysis, as well as Trade Finance Automation to automate document completeness in the Letter of Credit (LC) process.

During its seven years of operation, 6Estates has processed more than 1.8 million documents, and has supported approximately 23 document formats on its platform.

Some of the big companies that are already using solutions from 6Estates include BCA, DBS, Unilever, Nestle, Samsung, and Edelman. This investment further strengthens the Sinar Mas Group’s belief in entering the digital industry.

One of the group representatives said, “We believe that 6Estates’ AI capabilities in credit scoring systems, fraud detection, and cross-selling capabilities can be a benchmark for financial institutions in Indonesia for optimal application of artificial intelligence.”

The Potential Of AI In Indonesia

The use of AI technology or artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to replace human decisions with automated decisions that represent humans.

This technology is often used in areas that can have a significant impact on the lives of many people, for example in large technology companies, multilateral institutions, and the banking industry for economic progress and national development. Various countries, including Indonesia, have also made national artificial intelligence strategies. 

Last 2020, BRIN (formerly BPPT) together with the quad helix from various government institutions, universities – including USK, communities, and industry, have succeeded in formulating the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence for Indonesia 2020 – 2045.

This formulation becomes a national policy direction for national preparedness and planning in order to be able to optimally utilize the development of AI technology in the country. To date, more and more platforms are offering AI-based solutions in Indonesia.

One of them is Konvergen.ai which applies deep-learning Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to convert physical documents and pdf documents into text. In addition, Datasaur.id and Prosa.ai also focus on developing solutions using natural language processing technology (NLP).

The research institute Fortune Business Insight released research results related to the valuation of the global artificial intelligence market in 2021 which will reach $47 billion or equivalent to IDR 673 trillion, according to the average percentage growth since 2017 which is 31% per year. 

That figure is expected to continue to increase to $360 billion in 2028, as market demand increases which will continue to grow by 33% annually.