AI Marketing firm Needle Secures $1.2 Million in its pre-seed Round

Needle, a Singapore-based AI marketer, has raised US$1.2 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed round spearheaded by local accelerator Iterative. In addition to Rainforest Founder JJ Chai, Ethos Fund and Goldbell Financial Services participated. The cash will be used to expand the startup's personnel, which will include data scientists, AI trainers, and engineers.

“It’s never been easier to start a business, and it’s also never been harder to grow one. New brands need to find customers on multiple channels and transact with them on multiple platforms. On average, they are using over ten tools which is also a lot of data to make sense of and a lot of decisions to make. At Needle, we want to help founders cut through the noise, make sense of their data, and point them where to focus,” said Kiyan Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder of Needle.

Needle was formed by Foroughi and other seasoned e-commerce entrepreneurs and operators. Foroughi, a serial entrepreneur, previously launched Electric8. He also serves as a seed investor in Ometria. He was previously the Managing Director of Shopee (Sea Group).

It is an end-to-end AI marketer for rising brand owners who are frequently resource-constrained and spend up to US$3,000 per month on generic marketing efforts with little to no ROI.

The startup begins by assisting entrepreneurs with idea generation, then evaluates business and marketing priorities before providing tailored advice for effective techniques. Needle uses generative AI to automate the process of creating emails as well as preparing and launching ad campaigns.