Pencil wants AI to brainstorm ads for advertisers and businesses

It seeks to plug a deficit in creatives as firms get more consumer-centric.

The pain point AI platform Pencil looks to address is the ‘creative’ deficit in advertising today, where most advertising firms are consumer-centric, leaving their creative teams overwhelmed. Hence, they created a platform that will help people create the content they need through artificial intelligence (AI).

“We don't talk about ourselves as an adtech firm. Advertising is just one form of content. We're a creative AI company. Most adtech focuses on targeting consumers - we plug into the adtech ecosystem, offering AI-generated content at incredible scale. This is exactly what's been missing from the ecosystem for some time,” said Will Hanschell, co-founder and CEO of Pencil.

Pencil’s AI platform has two sets of algorithms. Hanschell explains that the first one takes a brief, as well as words or imagery, and experiments with them. The other set looks at everything that's been generated, and tries to pick out what's most relevant for a given brand or audience. It also takes into consideration what's most likely to deliver against marketing objectives.

The startup makes profit by charging e-commerce businesses, brands and agencies a monthly fee to access the platform.

In May, Pencil secured $1.66m in a seed funding round led by Wavemaker Partners, together with SGInnovate, Entrepreneur First and the Xoogler Angels. Hanschell said that they plan to use this to build their core engineering and customer teams in Singapore, as well as investing in key datasets and partnerships in order to scale the technology.