According to Techcrunch, Penny, a personal finance bot we reviewed last fall, has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from Social Capital.

The app offers a chat-based interface that offers advice tailored to your personal finances. This advice includes things like how much you spend on food each week, how this month's spending compares to last month's and even income graphs.

One unique thing about Penny is that the app only lets you send pre-populated messages, not natural language requests.

The startup explains that they implemented this feature so the user isn't forced 'to figure out not only what they want to ask, but also how to ask it in a way the bot understands.'

Penny currently only lives in its own iOS- and Android-based mobile app. However, Mitchell Lee, co-founder of Penny, noted that they would definitely consider putting their bot on a platform like Facebook Messenger, but not yet -- mainly because the startup can't yet see a clear value proposition of offering Penny on other platforms. This is because the young platforms aren't yet developed enough to fully support Penny's key features (secure password entry, pre-populated responses, etc).

The startup will use the funding to hire one or two people to deepen their expertise in machine learning, a critical (but often forgotten) part of developing a bot. It will also let them continue to experiment with figuring out how Penny will provide value to users, as the app currently doesn't have any monetization components.