How Influencees is Building the AI Layer for the Creator Economy
NUS Computing alumnus Davidson Chua is on his second venture, built to help the creators the industry keeps overlooking get discovered
When Davidson Chua (Class of 2026, BSc in Business Analytics) first joined the NUS Venture Initiation Programme (VIP@SoC), he was working on his first serious attempt at building a startup.
The idea focused on helping car sellers compare offers more transparently, and while the venture eventually took a different path, the experience became a crucial starting point in his entrepreneurial journey.
Through his first startup, Davidson learnt what it meant to build from the ground up. This included speaking to users, validating assumptions, navigating uncertainty, and understanding that a startup journey is rarely linear.
More importantly, it was through the programme that he met Edwin, who was assigned as his mentor.
What began as a formal mentorship under the programme soon developed into a long-term founder-advisor relationship. Edwin continued to guide Davidson beyond the original venture, helping him think through market opportunities, sharpen his execution, and eventually pivot towards a new idea which evolved into the building of their new venture, Influencees.
Today, Influencees is an AI-powered creator analytics and collaboration platform built to help brands find, evaluate, and work with creators more effectively.
The startup was founded on a simple belief of how some of the most valuable creators are not always the ones with the largest followings.
Across platforms, there are many niche creators, community builders, and emerging voices who drive real engagement and trust, but remain difficult for brands to discover.
For brands, creator marketing remains highly manual and fragmented. Teams often rely on follower counts, spreadsheets, social media searches, and personal networks to identify creators.
Even after a creator is shortlisted, brands still face the challenge of understanding whether the creator is truly relevant to their campaign, audience, product, and desired content direction.
Influencees aims to solve this gap by making creator discovery more structured, intelligent, and accessible. Instead of relying only on surface-level metrics, the platform uses AI to help brands better understand creators based on relevance, content style, audience fit, campaign suitability, and the wider context behind their content.
For Davidson, the opportunity became clear from both personal experience and market observation. Having built and managed online communities himself, he saw how much influence smaller creators and community-led voices could have.
As AI continues to reshape how content is created, analysed, and distributed, Influencees sees a larger opportunity beyond creator discovery alone.
The team is working towards a future where brands and creators can use AI not just to search for profiles, but to understand content performance, analyse creator brand-fit, generate campaign insights, and eventually support more agentic workflows around campaign planning, content ideation, posting, and optimisation.
This means building towards an all-in-one intelligence layer for the creator economy. For brands, this could mean asking an AI assistant to recommend creators for a campaign, explaining why they are suitable, comparing them across different content angles, and surface relevant posts or audience signals.
For creators, it could mean having AI tools that help them understand what content works, generate ideas from briefs, refine storytelling angles, and better position themselves for brand opportunities.
The concept for Influencees did not emerge overnight. Through numerous conversations with Edwin over the years, Davidson regularly bounced ideas off his mentor, discussing market gaps, testing assumptions, and exploring different directions for his next venture.
These sessions helped him refine his thinking and better understand where meaningful opportunities existed. As they examined trends in the creator economy together, a clearer picture began to emerge.
While brands were increasingly investing in creator marketing, discovering the right creators remained a fragmented and inefficient process. At the same time, AI was rapidly changing what was possible in content creation, analysis, and campaign workflows.
Those discussions ultimately helped shape the vision behind Influencees and gave Davidson greater conviction to pursue the opportunity.
“Influencees is about giving brands a better way to discover creators, while giving creators more opportunities to be seen,” Davidson shared. “There are many talented people building communities and creating valuable content, but not all of them have access to the right brand opportunities. We want to bridge that gap, and we believe AI can make this process far more intelligent, scalable, and meaningful.”
Edwin has played a critical role in this next chapter. From mentoring Davidson during the early startup days to helping Influencees close a six-figure funding, he has become an important part of both the company’s growth and Davidson’s development as a founder.
“Davidson’s journey reflects what entrepreneurship is truly about. It’s not getting the first idea right, but learning, adapting, and having the conviction to keep building,” Edwin shared.
“Our relationship began as mentor and mentee, but has since evolved into a partnership grounded in shared belief in the opportunity. I’ve watched him grow from a student founder into a confident entrepreneur, and Influencees is a testament to his resilience, curiosity, and commitment to solving real problems.”
His involvement reflects the kind of long-term mentorship that can shape a founder beyond a single programme or business idea.
While Davidson’s first idea was the starting point, Influencees represents the evolution towards a sharper opportunity, a clearer market need, and a stronger founder-mentor partnership.
For Professor Francis Yeoh, Chair of the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Department at NUS Computing, Davidson’s journey could reflect the broader value of supporting founders through the uncertain and non-linear process of venture building.
“Davidson has demonstrated remarkable business acumen with his readiness to adapt to what the market needs in his startup journey,” said Professor Yeoh. “I am pleased that the SoC innovation ecosystem has enabled his partnership with Edwin to happen.”
As Influencees enters its next phase, the team is focused on growing its network of brands and creators, strengthening its AI-powered discovery and analytics tools, and building trust within the creator economy.
With the platform now live, the company is working towards a larger goal of making creator-brand collaborations more accessible, data-informed, and intelligent.
A recent example of this is the Creator Creates Series, an Influencees-led creator hackathon that brings together creators to work on real brand challenges, produce content in their own style, and explore how data, creativity, and community engagement can come together in modern creator campaigns.
The initiative also reflects Influencees’ broader approach to building the creator economy from both sides. Helping brands discover the right creators, while giving emerging creators more opportunities to be seen, supported, and valued.
What started as a student founder’s first venture has now grown into a funded startup with a broader mission: to help the next generation of creators be discovered, valued, and connected to the opportunities they deserve.
