Entrepreneurship in Singapore gets a boost

SEVEN leading entrepreneurs, who by their sheer determination and hard work have excelled in their chosen field, were presented the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2021 Singapore awards on Nov 22.

Organised by the professional services organisation EY, this year's event marks the 20th anniversary of the awards in Singapore.

The 7 entrepreneurs from 5 organisations who are recipients of the 20th EY Entrepreneur Of The Year (EOY) 2021 Singapore awards are: Aaron Tan, founder and chief executive officer (CEO), Carro (digital automotive solutions); Alex Chua, CEO, Goldbell Financial Services (financial services); Jackson Aw, founder and CEO, Mighty Jaxx (collectibles and lifestyle products); Zhou Lihan, co-founder and CEO, Zou Ruiyang, co-founder and CTO, and Isaac Ho, CIO, MiRXES (biotechnology); and Walter de Oude, founder and deputy chairman, Singlife (digital insurance solutions).

The theme of the awards is "The Unstoppables", which aptly reflects the winners this year. Awards organiser EY says that the winners were selected by an independent judging panel, based on their merits in fulfilling the 6 global judging criteria, namely entrepreneurial spirit, financial performance/value creation, strategic direction, national and global impact, innovation and personal integrity/purpose driven leadership.

Indranee Rajah, Minister in the Prime Minister's Office, Second Minister for Finance and Second Minister for National Development, was guest of honour at the event.

Says Carro's Tan: "We are truly making a difference and bringing transparency to a business that has been traditionally mistaken as being opaque and untrustworthy. I credit this award to the hard work and dedication of the team and more importantly the thousands of satisfied and happy customers around the region."

Carro is in the business of making buying and selling cars simple and transparent.

"We are Amazon.com for car buyers and sellers. We want to make it so simple that you just have to click, buy and drive."

Tan says that in his view, entrepreneurship is important as without entrepreneurs, life as we know it would not be possible.

"The iPhone would not have been invented, cars would not have been born and for that matter the world would not have been connected through trade," he says.

He adds: "We have to start early and expose our talent all over the world - not only in the developed markets but also the under-developed ones. I credit my business acumen to the fact that I started early. My US stint - both having worked and studied there - really helped hone my business skills and made me a better entrepreneur".

Goldbell Financial Services' (GBFS) Chua says: "It is an honour and validation of our father's legacy to be recognised by a prestigious award like EY and among such respected brands and companies. It is also a testament to our commitment and dedication to supporting local SMEs and heartland enterprises."

"I believe we won this year's award due to our bold vision. We began by focusing on digital transformation to optimise our operational workflows, implementing a cloud first strategy that includes automation and end-to-end communication between operating systems," he added.

Further, to address funding, GEN, a private debt investment platform, was set up to generate additional revenue streams and economic sustainability by tapping into retail and institutional investors.

Subsequently, Polaris was launched. It is a venture lending financial launchpad designed to originate scalable deal flows through strategic collaborations with high growth digital first companies, including start-ups.

"We believe in the value of being involved in the process from start to finish. Polaris collaborates with digital first companies to co-create digital loan products through innovative structuring, allowing them to embed into their tier two supply chains. To date, it has aided over 15 companies in raising capital through an innovative debt structure."

Goldbell has a culture of innovation that involves constantly challenging the status quo and actively seeking out clients' unmet needs to stay relevant and ahead of the competition.

This has kept it relentlessly reinventing the company to stay ahead of the competition while maintaining its heritage and values as a homegrown company that prioritises relationships with the local community.

Goldbell Financial Services (GBFS) is a subsidiary of Goldbell Group, Singapore's largest commercial vehicles and industrial equipment distribution and leasing company.

Mighty Jaxx's Aw, winner of the collectibles and lifestyle products category, says he sees winning the award as affirmation towards building the company into a pop culture powerhouse, from Singapore to the world.

"Although the award was given this year, it is an ongoing journey of dedication and hard work to build this business since conceptualising it in 2012. In every stage of the company's growth, we have our colleagues who brave the odds and each contributed to this iteration of Mighty Jaxx. I believe our work to bridge a variety of passions using our phygital collectibles is innovative and forward thinking. When vision combines with a sustainable business and timing, this creates something extraordinary."

Mighty Jaxx is a future culture company that designs and manufactures phygital collectibles and lifestyle products in collaboration with global brands. Since inception, it has shipped phygital collectibles to collectors in over 80 countries.

"We are building towards a vision where we are creators of a phygital space created by combining different aspects of new technologies, to enable users to interact virtually in a physical space and deliver extended entertainment through our collectibles," says Aw.

For MiRXES' Dr Zhou, getting the EY award "is a great validation of our journey in the last decade to anchor RNA diagnostic technology development in Singapore, which led to the development of GASTROClear, the world's first RNA cancer screening test and our contribution to Singapore's pandemic response through Fortitude Kit, its first approved Covid-19 PCR test".

RNA and PCR technologies have become household names because of Covid-19.

"They were rarely heard of when we embarked on such research more than a decade ago in A*Star and NUS. We believe the award recognises our courage to explore uncharted territory and the team's perseverance through the decade long development cycle. We hope that beyond Covid-19, the world is able to leverage RNA technologies to address other critical healthcare challenges in the early detection of cancer," he says.

MiRXES is a Singapore headquartered biotechnology company focused on saving and improving lives with RNA powered disease early detection tests.

It developed GASTROClear, the world's first microRNA blood test for early detection of gastric cancer and contributed its capabilities to the scale-up and supply chain resilience of the Fortitude Kit. It continues to innovate as a global RNA platform for early detection of disease and a regional genomics platform for precision medicine.

"MiRXES continues to accelerate our multi-cancer early detection pipeline, as well as expand aggressively across the globe. We believe the future of healthcare will shift from treating the sick to preventive healthcare, and are committed to changing lives by delivering preventive healthcare solutions and precision medicine to all via our science and innovation."

For Singlife's de Oude, winner of the digital insurance solutions award, it is the highest honour that any entrepreneur can wish for.

"It's a validation of all the hard work, blood, sweat and tears that have gone towards building something that I'm truly proud of - a great business that is of benefit to so many people. But it's more than that, it also honours everyone on the team that believed together with me in creating something awesome and who believed that we could make a better financial services future," he says.

"The ambition of building a life insurance company from scratch and growing it into a leading financial services company is what many would call a 'big hairy audacious goal'.

"It's the combination of building a business that grew super-fast because our customers actually like our products and services, and accelerating that with the combination of the Aviva and Singlife businesses in 2020 to create a unicorn twice over really set us apart," he adds.