We’re growing in a place that has no ventilation,
no natural light. This is as hard as it gets!
The coronavirus pandemic has uprooted most aspects
of daily life, and much of the economy built around it.
We have to adapt to cater to the needs of
the user.
But some start-ups are finding opportunities
in crisis by sowing the seeds for a new future.
We look at 50 years into the future and you try to
imagine a snapshot of what the world looks like.
To get a sense of how that might play out,
I’m in Singapore speaking to three fast-growing
start-ups to hear how they’re building businesses
for a post-pandemic world.
When the novel coronavirus emerged at the
start of 2020, it set off alarm bells in Singapore.
As one of the countries hardest hit by the
2003 SARS outbreak, Singapore was placed on
a heightened state of alert within weeks and
social restrictions were tightened.
That prompted a run on supermarkets amid concerns
about food shortages in the Southeast Asian city state.
But even before the pandemic, agriculture
technology start-ups such as Ben Swan’s
Sustenir were working on a solution.
Sustenir’s vision is to actually grow a
more resilient future.
What we do is we grow incredible products
that not only taste better than conventional
farming, but is actually 100% clean, free of pesticides,
and it’s actually more nutritious as well.
The ex-engineer launched his vertical farming
start-up in Singapore in 2013 to address food
scarcity issues with a more sustainable approach
to mass agriculture.
But the pandemic has put those concerns directly
under the microscope, says Ben.
A lot of Singaporeans became a lot more aware
about where their produce was coming from,
a lot more concerned about the safety of their
products.
I think for the Singapore government, it was very much
about the food resilient system that they’ve built.
Relying on neighboring countries, but when
the border shut down what do we do?
So, there’s big focus now on how do we get
our productivity up?
Food security is a rising concern for countries
as weather pattern changes disrupt crops,
while a growing global population adds stress
to food supply chains.
Today, less than 10% of Singapore’s nutritional
needs are produced in the land-scarce country,
which is smaller than New York City.
The country hopes to raise the figure to 30%
by 2030 through smart land use and technology,
including investments in deep-tech start-ups
like agri-food.
All the agencies have really collaborated
and come together to help companies like Sustenir
do the things that we’re doing today.
When we think about R&D, it’s very expensive.
We, as a business, want to focus on bringing
great products, but we also have to think
about how do we further improve the way that
we’re growing, so that we can think about
bringing down our cost and also broadening
our product mix.
Ben is optimistic that could also mean positioning the
company and the country as a leading food innovator.
Because our system can literally retrofit
into any building in the world, we do want
to be, eventually, in every major city across
the world.
Maybe even one day we could consider exporting
certain produce into our neighboring countries.
Start-ups play a critical role in Singapore’s
economy.
So when the pandemic threatened to uproot
the ecosystem, the government unveiled more
than $200 million in funding to support promising
start-ups.
I've come to BLOCK71, the symbolic birthplace
of Singapore’s start-up scene, to hear from
one of its rising names, cashback platform
ShopBack.
ShopBack is a shopping assistant.
We build tools to help users to find great
deals, save time and get rewarded with cashback.
Somebody goes through our application, we
send them to the merchant portal, and whatever
they buy we get paid a commission, which we
share with the user as cashback.
This is real cashback they can cash out to
their bank accounts.
Since launching in 2014, the Singaporean start-up
has grown steadily, providing $115 million
in cash back to over 20 million users across
Asia Pacific.
But when the pandemic hit, the business had
to respond to changing consumer habits quickly.
I think users are not cutting their spending,
they are just more mindful of how they spend.
And they are also unsure where they can spend
on when offline options are no longer available.
So that’s where we introduce what are new
possibilities in this new norm.
So it’s all about helping users to shop
smart in different ways.
That included getting more businesses online
amid lockdown measures nationwide.
In a recent study, nine in 10 small and medium-sized
businesses in Asia Pacific said they are more
reliant on technology due to the pandemic.
Shopback, which earns a commission from its
affiliate merchants every time a sale is made,
added 500 new retailers between April and
June, expanding its list of 4,000 brands including
Taobao, Amazon and Expedia.
Merchants are increasingly more mindful of
their marketing spend, and that’s where
our pay-per-sale model resonates with them.
You can see this from the uplift in new merchants
joining us.
And in the first half of this year, we have
driven slightly under $1 billion in sales
for our merchants, which is actually more
than the same period in 2019.
That’s fascinating.
A thriving start-up system requires good infrastructure,
such as seamless connectivity and fast internet speeds.
Even before the pandemic, internet penetration
rates were rising across the globe.
But with more people working from home and
under lockdown, that trend has been exacerbated,
putting a strain on networks.
That’s something laser communications company
Transcelestial aims to fix.
Transcelestial is trying to solve the issue
of internet connectivity globally.
The Singaporean start-up's wireless devices
transmit data via light, which co-founder
Rohit Jha says is a more efficient and cost-effective
alternative to laying traditional fiber optic cables.
Light, in very technical terms, has nearly
1,000 to 1,000,000 times bigger capacity to
carry data and information.
That could help improve internet connectivity,
especially in emerging markets.
At the end of 2019, 3.6 billion people
were not connected to the internet,
or 46 percent of the global population.
What if we could build something which
could transmit the highest amounts of data,
like a fibre, but wirelessly.
So it takes like less than 10 minutes to set
up and can be nearly infinitely scalable in
terms of information.
And that’s how this device came about.
Yeah, so you culminated in this?
This is kind of like the size of a small shoe
box. It weighs less than three kilograms.
It’s capable of replacing those very expensive
fibers on a city level or on a country level.
As the push toward 5G heats up, fast and reliable
connectivity is especially crucial for business.
While Singapore ranks as a global leader for
internet connectivity, much of Southeast Asia
is still catching up.
By 2025, the region is expected to account
for almost a third of global 5G deployments.
Rohit wants to make sure that coverage is
evenly distributed.
We do one gigabit and 10 times faster, which
is 10 gigabits.
That product is aimed directly at the 5G market.
That will help bring 5G ahead by at least
six to eight months or even a year.
To drive that vision, four-year-old Transcelestial
closed a $9.6 million funding round in July,
co-led by the Singapore government investment
arm EDBI and venture capital firm Wavemaker Partners.
That came even as global funding has shrunk
this year.
Most of the investors that we got are people
who looked at long-term horizons, and that’s
the conversation I have with investors when
we actually do initial stuff.
I think that was quite helpful, right, looking
up to stable investors who understand
that we are in for the long-term.
