Garage

Dear Garage reader,

It’s been half a decade since the inception of Garage and for this final newsletter, we’ve decided to take a look at some of the team’s greatest hits over the years.

Who can forget how my colleagues Claudia and Sharanya broke the story of Flash Coffee’s shock winding up in Singapore or that it owed S$14 million to creditors?

Also, do you recall the brouhaha around biotech startups as funding dried up, with the Garage team breaking the story of Biofourmis’ layoffs and ousting of its CEO? And let’s not leave out the closure of Temasek-backed Tessa Therapeutics, a story that spawned from an offhand comment.

We’ve also documented investor sentiment as startup funding started to slow down, what opportunistic investors were looking at, and how cautious investors were despite the taps flowing again.

Then there was our profile series 5 Questions, in which we interviewed titans of the startup ecosystem. Some had interesting back stories and some elusive ones.

A memorable story that the founding reporters of Garage covered was the honestbee saga, which Sharanya has described as being a rollercoaster ride. The company’s odyssey was a crash course on what happens when a startup gets into trouble, finally runs out of money, and goes through liquidation.

“I was surprised I even found myself writing not just restructuring stories but even a colourful piece on how honestbee had an art stash that included the iconic Lichtenstein painting Bedroom,” Sharanya said.

Another story Claudia found memorable was the one on GIC and Temasek’s stakes in the startup ecosystem. The piece involved trawling through prospectuses, cross-checking financial filings and press releases, and tracing investments made through vaguely-named SPVs.

"Most news publications hadn't realised that data on Temasek and GIC investments, traditionally so closely guarded, had been made public for the first time after several of their portfolio companies filed prospectuses during the tech IPO season," she said.

So here we are, at the end of the run for the Garage newsletter. It’s been our pleasure to provide you with the latest startup and tech news from Singapore and the region over these past five years.

To stay updated on the local and regional tech scene, sign up for Tech In Asia’s free daily newsletter, which will bring you the latest developments in bite-sized reads. You can also subscribe to Tech in Asia at 50 per cent off to get instant access to premium analyses, investigative pieces and data reports.

For BT subscribers, you can also access past issues of the Garage newsletter on our archive page.

Thank you again for being a part of our Garage journey and for your continuing support of The Business Times.

Benjamin Cher
BT Garage