Weekend interview: Lai Shanru

Block 71 may not have the same global cachet as say, Area 51 or even Taipei 101, but this non-descript building in Ayer Rajah Crescent lies at the centre of Singapore's burgeoning start-up scene. It's the government-supported space for fledgling tech companies, venture capitalists and the like. It's also where Lai Shanru and her five co-founders at e-commerce site ShopBack spent many of their waking hours, plotting to conquer the Asia-Pacific region with their fast-growing cashback programme. Block 71 has since expanded to neighbouring buildings, with an all-inclusive title (LaunchPad@one-north) to describe a start-up ecosystem with success stories to tell. One of them - ShopBack, with 120 employees and counting, based mainly in Singapore but with an overseas presence as well - has now moved to larger premises in nearby Block 77.

Since it officially launched in September 2014, the company - which works as an affiliate marketer with various e-commerce sites, offering a cash rebate in return for every sale generated - has signed up over 2.5 million people across the region, with about 400,000 in Singapore. ShopBack has enjoyed impressive year-on-year growth and now has a portfolio of over 1,300 merchants in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan, registering one transaction every five seconds or so.

Ms Lai, 29, was chugging along as a research analyst in a local bank before joining online fashion store Zalora, where she met Henry Chan and Joel Leong, who put her marketing and development skills to good use while developing the one-stop-shop concept that eventually became ShopBack. Together with fellow 20-somethings Bryan Chua, Samantha Soh, Derrick Goh and a handful of staffers, they moved into Block 71. Working with US$500,000 in seed funding and the less-than-scintillating-yet-effective tagline "Shop online, earn cash back", they turned ShopBack into Singapore's top cashback site.