By SGN | 5 May 2026
Jay was bitten by the startup bug before college had even begun.
During the year between national service and enrolling at Cornell University, he joined ShopBack, the Singaporean e-commerce startup. Though he was just an intern, Jay held big responsibilities. He oversaw recruitment, flying to Malaysia and Indonesia with CEO Henry Chan to interview and hire programmers and country managers.
“I would be asking coding questions and I had no idea what was going on,” he laughs. “I had to pretend to understand when they mentioned programming frameworks like Mocha or Laravel.”
Eventually, Jay realised that computer science was logic-based and not all that intimidating. To his surprise, when he asked candidates about their biggest regret in college, over half said it was not learning how to code.
Once he landed in the US, he knew what his major would be. “I was going to go all in on computer science and make that my career path,” he says.
Meeting his co-founder at Lyft
After graduation, Jay moved to San Francisco. “I wanted to have a career in hard technology, and I felt the only way to do that was to immerse myself in the startup ecosystem in the Bay Area,” he says.
Fresh off his studies in computational biology, he worked for a biotech startup called Freenome as a software engineer. Two years later, he joined Lyft. “I really wanted to learn from the best,” he explains, “and at that point self-driving was where all the best talent went.”
At Lyft, Jay met his future co-founder Sammy Sidhu, whom he describes as a “super high flyer” that has been programming since he was 12. When Lyft sold its self-driving car division to Toyota, Jay and Sammy considered their next steps.
Having wrangled enormous amounts of audio, image and video data at Lyft, the pair began to suspect that the processing of messy, unstructured data – anything that doesn’t fit in tables or spreadsheets – might have vast potential beyond autonomous vehicles.
In early 2022, they founded Eventual, effectively placing a bet that the market for multimodal data processing would expand. And they were right.
The seismic impact of ChatGPT
Barely a year later, ChatGPT swept the world. With it came the onslaught of generative AI and a relentless flood of unstructured data – precisely what Eventual was built to tackle. “When ChatGPT exploded, everyone jumped on the bandwagon,” Jay notes. “Every company became a AI company.”
Processing terabytes and petabytes of data, he explains, requires distributed computing or the use of multiple machines. Eventual built an engine called Daft for this purpose, cleaning up raw data and allowing users to build meaningful data sets to train their models on.
Jay points out that the hockey-stick curve startups try to emulate is really made up of “little step functions”, and that Eventual’s growth didn’t come down to a single dramatic breakthrough.
“Three years ago we were just two guys programming in Sammy’s basement,” he says, recalling that lunch in those days was at a Castro Valley sandwich shop called Mr. Pickle’s. Today, Eventual has an office in downtown San Francisco and counts Amazon, Mobileye, Together AI and CloudKitchens as clients. In mid-2025, the startup announced that it had raised $30 million in seed and Series A funding from the likes of Y Combinator, Citi and Microsoft’s M12 fund.
Looking ahead, Eventual is exploring a bigger vision of what data for AI means, which includes building software to help AI agents retrieve the right data. “The agents get the best possible context so that they can make the best possible decisions,” Jay explains.
What it means to be Singaporean
When he first moved to the Bay Area, Jay was startled by the trash, drugs, homelessness and incidents of harassment on the street, scenes he would have never come across in Singapore.
But he soon figured out how to move about the city more wisely, which subway lines to avoid at which hours. “You learn that a lot of these things may be less scary than they look,” he says.
He has grown a deep appreciation for the nature that surrounds the city, like the sun rising above the mountains on his morning drive to work along the I-280. “From San Francisco you have access to the beach, you have access to the mountains, you have access to deserts – you have everything,” he says.
While most Singaporeans abroad have to build connections from scratch, Jay counts himself lucky. For years, three of his closest friends from softball in secondary school lived in the Bay Area. (One has moved to Tokyo.) “We’ve known each other for something like 20 years,” he says. “And somehow we all ended up here, all ended up in tech.”
Jay finds it heartening to see strong Singaporean communities form in the Bay Area. “It never feels like a bubble,” he says, adding that their proficiency in English naturally makes them open to non-Singaporeans.
He regularly meets new Singaporean arrivals in tech who reach out to him on LinkedIn for a coffee. “And whenever National Day rolls around, there’s a big celebration that happens in the Bay Area,” he shares. “All these Singaporeans come out of the woodwork to meet and eat Singaporean food. I think it’s great.”
“For me, Singapore is more than a location on Earth,” he says. “Being Singaporean is an identity formed by shared experience and cultural values. By virtue of us being a small country, we have to be global.”
About Jay
Jay Chia is the co-founder of Eventual, a data for AI startup based in San Francisco that has raised $30 million in funding. He was formerly a software engineer at Lyft and graduated from Cornell University with a degree in computer science.
Connect with him here.
