By SGN | Updated 24 Jan 2024
There are moments when innovators come together to signal major changes ahead. 2024 will prove to be such a pivotal period.
Here are the noteworthy founders from 5 Singapore startups who’ve shown that they can adapt, evolve and go-to-market.
TurtleTree: Max Rye & Fengru Lin
Alternative cruelty-free dairy for athletes
A vision to replicate the success of lab-grown meat in dairy came about through a chance encounter between Fengru, at her Google office in Singapore, and Max, a visiting speaker on cultivated meats.
“Fengru had travelled to many dairy farms in Asia to source quality milk for her cheesemaking hobby, but what she found instead were cows being pumped with hormones and unsanitary living conditions for the livestock,” says Max.
The pair got to thinking about how they could produce cruelty-free quality milk. In 2019, TurtleTree was founded.
While full-spectrum cell-cultured milk is still some distance away for the startup, they’ve successfully pivoted to precision fermentation to brew dairy protein, lactoferrin, which has higher economies of scale.
The animal-free process encodes milk protein DNA sequences into yeast, and then uses it to ferment a mixture of sugar and nutrients in tanks, much like brewing beer.
Also known as ‘first milk’, lactoferrin is a highly sought-after whey protein that takes at least 10,000 litres of milk for 1kg of yield. Its purified form currently retails for $750 to $1500 per kg.
So far, their venture has attracted $40 million in investments. In Q4 of 2023, their first product, LF+, entered commercialisation and achieved self-affirmed GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status in the US.
“We’re working on getting into the infant nutrition market, but in the first instance we’re focused on adult nutrition,” says Fengru. “Lactoferrin has a lot of benefits around gut health and iron regulation. There are also applications in sports nutrition, women’s health, and plant-based milks.”
Max and Fengru hosted their first exclusive tasting event in San Francisco in March 2023, and have set their sights on getting full FDA approval for LF+ by Q2 2024. Vegan and climate-conscious athletes are targeted as early adopters of TurtleTree’s animal-free, nutrient-packed offerings.
Transcelestial: Rohit Jha & Mohammad Danesh
Wireless laser-based connectivity and communication
Rohit and Danesh first met at Entrepreneur First, an accelerator programme that matches exceptional individuals to co-found a startup.
“One hour into the first day, Danesh and I started discussing how using lasers in deep space to communicate between planets and interstellar distances would be fundamental and transformational,” says Rohit.
“But first, we had to build technology to solve connectivity issues on this planet.”
Founded in 2016, Transcelestial has leveraged evolving wireless fibre optics technology and manufacturing capabilities in the last six years to develop CENTAURI, a hardy shoebox-sized device that delivers high-speed point-to-point connectivity via laser beam between buildings.
In the last two years, CENTAURI has seen significant success in its deployment in Asia, where smaller cities, towns and offshore islands have been left behind in terms of network infrastructure.
“The cost to connect the world is not commercially viable if upgrades depend on laying costly and time-consuming fibre-optic cables across difficult terrain,” Danesh elaborates.
In 2022, their proprietary lasers proved capable of delivering 5G wireless connectivity at 10Gbps, the equivalent of downloading a high-quality 4K movie in seconds.
The team have followed up on that success with a second iteration of CENTAURI, released in Q2 of 2023. Now capable of outstanding speeds of up to 25 Gbps, it is the first alternative to fibre cables that telcos have for delivering 25Gbps reliably and wirelessly in urban areas. The tech is already on its way to being used in Taiwan through a deal with telecom equipment system integrator dB-Tech.
With a total of $24 million secured from backers like Airbus and 500 Global, Rohit and Danesh are currently working on consolidating their production facility, Terabit Factory. Based in Singapore, it has the capacity to manufacture an estimated 2,400 CENTAURI devices annually, the largest volume of any laser comms producer globally.
ProfilePrint: Alan Lai & Rehan Amarasuriya
AI crop analysis to empower farmers and buyers
While travelling in Uganda in 2012, ProfilePrint founder Alan Lai encountered farmers selling chia seeds at a price six times less than the same ones being sold in London.
“Were the seeds in London of the same quality as those on the plantation? I couldn’t be sure. But I wanted to make the supply chain margin more equitable if they were,” says Alan.
An AI-driven profiling tool bringing transparency to the global commodities trade, ProfilePrint can authenticate small samples of plant-based products like cocoa, coffee beans, tea leaves and oilseeds.
It is a boon for the agri-food industry – rife with challenges like adulterated ingredients – and the demands of professionally inspecting imports.
Without brewing or breaking anything down, the molecular properties that comprise the unique “fingerprint” of each product are analysed by ProfilePrint’s scanner and run through a robust database within seconds.
It can also generate taste profiles of teas and coffees, matching them with consumers’ taste preferences, a feature Alan and co-founder Rehan (of B.P. de Silva, one of Singapore’s oldest family business in the tea and jewellery trade) showcased at the Singapore Tea Festival in 2018 and 2019.
The pair met through common friends, and while Rehan has returned to managing 1872 Clipper Tea and RISIS, B.P. de Silva remains one of the largest backers of the startup, counting itself amongst industry heavyweights like Cargill and Sinar Mas.
Today, ProfilePrint’s scanners are more portable and customisable than ever. In Q1 of 2023, Alan inked deals with three of Brazil’s top food companies: Louis Dreyfus, Olam and Sucafina.
“Buyers can now instantly assess crops remotely through ProfilePrint’s independent report and obtain recommended alternatives to achieve optimal blends,” he explains.
The process has already helped a major client in the cocoa industry source more cost-effective substitutes for their beans without compromising on their end-product’s flavour.
The result? Net annual savings of $1.64 million.
“Producers without prior training will also be able to rapidly ascertain the quality of their crop and get a fairer sales price,” Alan adds. ProfilePrint is currently gearing up to expand into the Chinese market with the help of venture capital firm Tai Partners.
LionsBot: Agatha Michelle Seow, Dylan Ng Terntzer & Rajesh Elara Mohan
New-age robot cleaners with a human-centric design
Making their way onto Forbes Asia’s 100 to Watch list in 2023, LionsBot is a robotics startup at the forefront of a cleaning revolution.
CEO and founder Dylan Ng recalls the idea’s genesis when he founded a cleaning supplies distribution company, SuperSteam Asia Pacific, together with LionsBot co-founder Michelle.
“We couldn’t find a suitable cleaning robot. They were either too big, too expensive or difficult to use. We realised there was a need for better and more powerful robots than what was available,” he says.
With their astute understanding of the cleaning industry’s labour crunch, they were confident that an enhanced robotic fleet could fill the gap and meet the growing appetite for automation. It would also allow cleaning professionals to pivot from physical labour to supervisory roles.
The team built their first cleaning robot from scratch after seeking out the leading robotics professor in Singapore, Dr Rajesh Elara Mohan, and launched LionsBot in 2018.
In the span of six years, the trio have achieved a pre-money valuation of $80 million, bringing a total of six models to market in over 30 countries.
Their LeoBot series is already a familiar sight at Changi Airport and the Esplanade. Featuring emotive blue LED eyes and an oval build with white panelling, its charming design is reminiscent of Eve from Pixar’s animated film WALL-E.
Their latest generation of models and tools, launched in Q2 of 2023, takes accessibility up a notch by enabling “zero-click” deployment and comes with an enhanced app and dashboard for remote management, tracking and task reports.
Dylan states, “The user experience is at the core of our product development. We make robots that people love to use, regardless of experience or age.”
Unravel Carbon: Grace Sai & Marc Allen
Helping companies track their emissions and decarbonise
“I was drafting a will for my two-year-old daughter and realised material things weren’t worth much if the world she was inheriting was going to be inhospitable,” says Grace Sai, CEO and co-founder of Unravel Carbon.
“I had already exited two ventures and thought I had enough in the tank for one more. I talked to the 20 smartest people I knew – friends from Silicon Valley and Oxford – and really tried to understand why there hadn’t been a scalable solution worldwide,” she recalls.
“It boiled down to there not being a solution that could be adopted at scale by the private sector. Which is what my co-founder Marc and I set out to do.”
Founded in January 2022, Unravel Carbon combines Grace’s business acumen with Marc’s 15 years of experience in engineering, sustainability and data science.
Unravel’s arrival is timely, in view of the global economy’s shift to quantifiable action against climate change. Between meeting new regulatory standards and shifting capital from high-efficiency to energy-efficient activities, businesses of all sizes are in a state of flux.
The pair offered an answer: an AI-powered decarbonisation platform that converts any company’s accounting data into full supply chain carbon data in seconds, auto-generating climate solutions and auto-populating regulatory disclosure reports.
Within four months, they raised $10 million in their seed round, led by Peak XV Partners (formerly known as Sequoia India & Southeast Asia), the largest for a climate tech software firm in Asia. They were also accepted into Y Combinator, the prestigious startup accelerator that has backed companies like Airbnb, Dropbox and DoorDash.
“Our process is as straightforward as uploading a CSV file onto the platform. It’s a clear box where you can see everything being measured. It’s auditable and interrogable,” Marc adds. He explains that Unravel makes decarbonisation accessible to SMEs who aren’t equipped to onboard or finance a team of consultants for months on end.
Unravel’s earliest clients include Temasek-backed SaladStop!, PropertyGuru, and Indonesian grocery delivery startup HappyFresh. Unlike many competitors, Unravel focuses on reductions instead of offsets.
“Asia-Pacific is responsible for 60% of global greenhouse emissions and home to 70% of global supply chains. There’s a lot of reduction opportunities on our home ground. Why not plan business strategies around it and gain a head-start in the inevitable low-carbon economy?” says Grace.
An early application of their platform by SaladStop! helped the food retailer identify their most emission-intensive ingredient, feta cheese, and outlined a set of greener alternatives, such as white goat cheese or locally sourced produce, that could be adopted.
Grace states, “That’s where we want to bring our clients to, to a point where they have the power of insight. It’s about adding new dimensions of clarity from their unstructured data, so that they are empowered to act.”
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