AI Funding

Singapore Based Chatbot Startup Pand.ai Bags US$ 1 Million in Seed Funding

Pand.ai, a Singapore-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup which develops smart chatbots, has snagged US$1 million in seed funding – the largest such amount raised from a single angel investor by a homegrown startup.

According to their statement, the unnamed angel investor is a barrister based in Hong Kong. He is also a prolific investor who has backed more than 10 ventures across China, Thailand, Hong Kong and Singapore.

This investment comes as Pand.ai achieved a revenue of more than S$1 million in the last 12 months ended June 30, 2019.

Founded in mid-2016 by Chuang Shin Wee and David Low, Pand.ai uses AI to create chatbots for financial institutions; its clients include Global Fortune 500 clients across Asia such as Schroders, Tokio Marine Life Singapore (TMLS), Bangkok Bank, Great Eastern Life and Allianz.

With the new capital, Pand.ai intends to strengthen its executive bench-strength. James Tan, former chief executive officer (CEO) of TMLS, who has been the non-executive chairman of Pand.ai’s advisory board since February 2019, will take on an additional and newly-created role of Executive-in-Residence. In that new role, James will spearhead Pand.ai’s insurance business across the Asia-Pacific.

Prior to TMLS, James has held various senior management positions at major financial firms, including AIA, Bain & Company, Friends Provident and Standard Chartered Bank.

Pand.ai co-founder and CEO Shin Wee says:

Shin Wee

“We’re extremely excited to have James in our leadership team. He will bring to the table invaluable industry subject matter expertise that will help Pand.ai scale as a company, and become the premium AI chatbot developer for financial services.”

Shin Wee adds:

“We are also thrilled to have an angel investor who shares the same vision as us: to develop deep, homegrown AI capabilities to enable Pand.ai to become well-positioned to capture and serve the Asian market for the long haul.”

Pand.ai is one-stop shop that offers end-to-end support in chatbot development, ranging from conceptualising to data cleaning to testing and even running the live bot post-production.

Pand.ai uses a proprietary Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine to enable its chatbots to understand multiple languages and local slangs, and use contextual memory for a more natural conversation.

Since its founding, Pand.ai has had many accolades to its name. It is the first startup in Southeast Asia to introduce cutting-edge transfer learning to NLP. It is also one of the Top 40 finalists of the Fintech Award at the 2019 Singapore Fintech Festival.

Earlier this year, it also won the Grand Prize at the Nanjing Overseas Talent Startup Competition (a startup contest backed by the Nanjing government), making it the first and only Singaporean team to win the award in the contest’s history.