INDUSTRIAL waste, when poorly managed, is a major cause of environmental pollution. Accidental spills sometimes go undetected, and the consequences may not be discovered until very much later when people start falling sick due to contamination of the soil, water, or air.
It is a global problem, which Singapore start-up Aprisium aims to address by helping companies and governments respond quickly at the first sign of trouble. The deep tech company provides onsite monitoring devices that can analyse waste discharge from factories within minutes and automatically transmit the findings to customers.
Detecting such leaks typically took days, since samples needed to be collected and sent to labs that may be located far away.
Aprisium’s patented technology allows it to detect a wide range of heavy metals and chemicals, and its devices will soon be used to identify nanoplastics as well. Nanoplastics, which are too small to be seen by the naked eye, are very difficult to detect and can cause great harm when they get into the bloodstream and embed themselves in different organs.
Meanwhile, Malaysia-based TROOPERS has played a transformative role in improving benefits for gig workers and addressing their lack of career prospects.
Besides matching thousands of people with temporary or part-time jobs each week through its app, the company also provides gig workers with training, insurance and other forms of support that are usually available only to full-time employees.
Employers benefit from TROOPERS as well since the company’s certification and rating systems allow them to screen potential employees more effectively. The firm recently opened an office in Singapore, and it is looking to expand in Vietnam and Thailand as well.
TROOPERS is one of three winners of the Emerging Enterprise Award, an annual honour co-presented by OCBC and The Business Times, while Aprisium won one of the two Most Promising Sustainability Startup awards that were handed out at the same event.
Cleaning up after poor waste management
Aprisium was founded in 2022 following a venture-building initiative to match promising technologies with investors, entrepreneurs, and managers who have had the experience of launching start-ups. Its technology is based on an electrochemical process that rapidly detects contaminants, which A*Star developed.
Its founder and CEO, Raghav Narayan, a veteran corporate executive who has also helped a tech startup expand in 26 countries, said Aprisium incorporated the A*Star technology into a device that can monitor waste continuously and send the results to customers using IoT (Internet of Things), a network of interrelated devices that connect and exchange data with one another.
Aprisium also developed a machine-learning algorithm to not only profile the contaminants but also deliver early warning alerts and insights to customers.
“Poor management of waste from factories is a major problem. Because we detect continuously and profile the entire discharge, we sometimes find things that companies don’t know about,” Narayan says.
Narayan says investing in better pollution controls is more than just good corporate citizenry, as accidental leaks can result in multi-million-dollar fines as well as reputational loss.
He adds that the company’s innovations “enable early detection of contamination, optimise treatment processes, predict system failures, and enhance operational efficiency, ultimately leading to more sustainable practices.”
Aprisium has successfully completed several trials in Singapore that demonstrated the feasibility of its technology, and it recently won a contract in South Korea to monitor pollutants. The company has set up an office in Sweden to serve as its European headquarters, and it is planning to expand in Australia and the US.
From no tech to high-tech
While Aprisium was set up to commercialise a promising technology, TROOPERS’ journey began with the identification of a gap in Malaysia’s growing market for part-time workers.
Having sought part-time work during their student days, Joshua Tan and Kelvin Lee, TROOPERS' first two co-founders, saw the need for a more efficient system of matching employers with job seekers that would also protect freelancers from unscrupulous companies.
COO and Executive Director Craig Goonting, a TROOPERS’ founding partner, recalled the early days when he and the founders would manually match job seekers with gigs and use WhatsApp messages to communicate with the part-timers and their employers.
“It was about three or four years in before we finally had the funds to start building the technology,” he says.
TROOPERS, which was founded in 2017, launched its app in 2021 and scaled its operations by providing a wide range of services to both employers and employees. It is Malaysia’s largest flexible job-matching platform, connecting more than 250,000 individuals to hundreds of companies, including household names such as BIG Pharmacy, Nandos, Heineken, TouchNGo, Maybank, and UMobile
TROOPERS demonstrated its popularity among part-time jobseekers in 2021, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when it recruited more than 1,000 people, including doctors and nurses, in less than two weeks on behalf of the Selangor state government to man 58 vaccination centres.
Some of TROOPERS’ more innovative features include pay advances to the part-time workers on its platform and a rating system to identify those who have excelled or underperformed. It also has payroll solutions that let part-timers track their earnings in real time and help employers with administration and payroll execution.
Its training arm, meanwhile, conducts classes ranging from navigating job interviews to food safety and warehouse operations. Part-timers who complete these courses receive badges as proof of their qualifications.
“As the future of work evolves, career pathways have expanded beyond your average nine-to-five jobs,” says Goonting.
“At TROOPERS, our aim is to redefine the way work is done and enable a more seamless platform for jobseekers to shape their careers, while simultaneously empowering partner organisations to efficiently manage their talent needs,” he adds.
Recognising the bold ambitions of young businesses in Asia
This is the last of a four-part series featuring the 2023 winners of the Emerging Enterprise Awards. Jointly organised by OCBC and The Business Times, the awards – now in its 16th year – honour innovative, resilient small and medium-sized enterprises under 10 years old. This year, the focus was on green and regional businesses, with winners gaining recognition and support from OCBC to maximise their potential.
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