FROM high-tech floor coatings to healthier snacks for children, the innovative products of these five companies provide fresh solutions and meet changing demands.
They are among 15 finalists of this year’s Emerging Enterprise Awards. Established in 2008, the awards recognise startups and young businesses across Singapore and Asia, providing resources to boost their growth.
Such high-performing businesses have an enterprising mindset, consistently pursue growth and are always on the lookout for new markets.
This year’s awards are co-presented by The Business Times and OCBC, and supported by Mastercard, Rajah & Tann Asia, RSM Singapore, the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Enterprise Singapore and Paia Consulting.
Creating picture-perfect surfaces with nano-coatings
Coval Technologies’ high-tech coatings are used not just on floors, but also ships
We are a manufacturer of high-performance, easy-to-apply nano-coatings that extend asset life, enhance aesthetics and reduce maintenance costs.
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The first products we released commercially were for flooring protection, whether concrete, stone, epoxy-coated or otherwise. Our coating is used as the final top coat to ensure long-lasting performance and aesthetics.
Coval Technologies is growing a global business, with our products available in over 30 countries through 199 distributors.
We bought the intellectual property rights to the precursor of our technology in 2020, from its inventor in Houston. Though promising, the technology was not yet fully commercialised, so we spent the next 18 months perfecting the formulation and process.
Our first product was soft-launched in May 2021, with a full launch at the 2022 World of Concrete exhibition in Las Vegas.
In 2022, we moved our headquarters to Singapore. Our primary research and development centre is also located here. A secondary lab is located in Houston. In August 2024, we opened an office in Abu Dhabi.
The US, Canada and Singapore are currently our biggest markets. We believe the Middle East will become one of our fastest growing regions in the next 12 months, supported by a major airport project at the end of this year.
We will continue to drive growth in our existing markets, and as those stabilise and achieve profitability, we plan to expand to Europe and South America.
Coval Technologies is actively pushing our technology into new areas and adding features.
We are about to release our next product, Harbor Guard, which is designed for the marine environment and targets boat owners and boatyards. After an initial launch in San Diego, we will be rolling it out in the US and eventually in other markets. This second vertical will demonstrate the wide-ranging uses for our coating.
Making sense of space with sensors
Deep-tech company Curium’s software brings together data from different sensors
We founded Curium back in 2020 to solve one of the biggest problems in the autonomous vehicles industry: the safety and reliability of autonomous features over time.
Due to the environment and road conditions, sensors in self-driving vehicles will become miscalibrated over time, compromising the safety of the vehicle and passengers or goods inside.
We became the first company to commercially provide on-the-go sensor calibration for such vehicles. Our patent-pending techniques can automate calibration for any system that relies on autonomous decision-making.
Sensors are the eyes of the autonomous system, sensing whether there is an obstacle in front of the vehicle and if so, how far away it is. Unfortunately, there is no single sensor which can provide accurate information about surroundings in all environmental conditions.
CuSense, Curium’s proprietary technology, fuses inputs from different sensors such as cameras, lidars (light detecting and ranging) and radars. It forms the basis for our smart mobility product CuCal, working as a unified “super sensor” that enhances a vehicle’s capability to “see” in all conditions.
Beyond self-driving vehicles, we have expanded into the smart cities space with CuSense-powered CuTrack. This allows for the monitoring of complicated public or industrial environments, by tracking assets such as humans, boxes, vehicles and raw materials.
It also creates a live digital twin of the surroundings, including elements such as walls, partitions and aisles. This digital model is automatically updated when new structures are created or removed.
Both CuCal and CuTrack are trialled, tested and deployed in Singapore, Europe and the United Arab Emirates. Now our focus is to scale up and grow our business both in terms of industry verticals and geographies. We’re looking at the US and China for mobility and the Middle East market for smart cities.
Providing healthier snacks for kids
Little Blossom’s additive-free snacks are formulated for children aged six months to six years
We are a homegrown baby and kids’ food brand, established in 2020. The company was born from our discovery of – and concern about – the added sugars, salts and preservatives in baby food products in supermarkets.
We wanted to introduce healthier, innovative options to the market. Our cereals and snacks are free from such additives, and made with organic and natural ingredients.
To grow with our customers, our product range caters to children aged six months to six years. We expanded to Malaysia in 2021, with our products now available in major retailers such as Fairprice, Cold Storage, Village Grocer and AEON.
In 2024, we further broadened our reach by entering the Vietnamese market through Con Cung, a prominent maternity and baby care retailer, as well as launching in the Philippines, Brunei and the Maldives. Currently, our products are available in over 1,000 stores across these six countries.
Our plan is to focus on enhancing brand visibility, engaging with local communities and making healthier food options for children accessible to more families throughout Asia.
The baby food sector is dominated by major brands that target the US and Europe, with products and formats remaining largely unchanged for decades. This has created a disconnect between what parents seek and what is available on store shelves.
Little Blossom bridges this gap by catering to the needs of modern Asian parents. Our products feature Asian flavours and are halal-certified.
An app for easy automotive management
Motorist integrates specialised automotive tools and services to help drivers make informed decisions
Our platform integrates more than 30 specialised tools and services, providing drivers with everything they need to address vehicle-related needs, from real-time vehicle valuations to car auctions.
Currently, we serve 15 per cent of all car owners in Singapore. We hope to increase this to 50 per cent by 2027, establishing Motorist as the go-to automotive super app.
To do so, we plan to increase the app’s features, such as adding an electric vehicle (EV) charging price comparison and payment tool.
Our strong technological foundation allows us to scale rapidly across Asia. Currently, we have an established presence in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, and our next target for expansion is Japan.
We are also expanding our ecosystem of partners, which already includes key collaborators such as Singapore Traffic Police and Esso.
Innovation is at the heart of Motorist’s growth strategy, fuelled by the integration of big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).
These technologies enabled the creation of our proprietary instant vehicle valuation tool, for instance. The value is updated daily, informed by the latest data from our auction platforms.
Our platform is also able to capture and identify trends when users change cars, allowing us to curate and suggest cars for similar users.
This focus on innovation and technology not only strengthens our leadership position in Singapore, but also drives our growth into new regions.
Sustainability is also a key focus, as we prepare our platform to support the growing number of EV users and environmentally conscious services.
Inspecting buildings with robots, rails and radar
WaveScan’s 3D imaging technology carries out inspections without causing damage
With our scanner hardware and AI-driven software for 3D data analysis, WaveScan allows for non-destructive inspection. This is used in the built environment, energy, oil and gas and infrastructure sectors.
For instance, we can detect internal cracks and voids in concrete slabs and corrosion in rebars – common defects in any built environment.
Our technology-enabled inspection services include on-site data collection using partner companies, as well as expert data analysis and post-processed inspection reports, with options for professional engineers’ endorsement.
Clients can thus conduct preventive and predictive maintenance, extending the useful lifetime of their assets.
WaveScan’s clientele spans both government and private sectors, with customers in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, India, Australia, China and Saudi Arabia.
Earlier this year, we piloted our IngressScan water leakage detection solution with Singapore’s Housing and Development Board, and plan for a nationwide rollout next year.
We have also incorporated a Hong Kong subsidiary and are working on replicating Singapore use cases with industry stakeholders there. This year, we have also been engaging with major oil and gas companies in Australia and Saudi Arabia.
Our first-generation scanner was launched in early 2022. Our scientists and engineers continue to upgrade its features, such as improving the spatial 3D resolution and allowing the scanner to penetrate deeper into the inspected structures.
To meet diverse needs, we offer four forms of our automated scanners: robotic arms, wall-climbing robots, motorised rails and large-area core-XY scanners.
Similarly, we have developed unique signal-processing algorithms and AI algorithms to filter and tag 3D images for specific use cases. This allows for detailed diagnostics imaging in cases that could previously only be inspected by destructive testing.
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