HR Asia republished the blog post by SGInnovate on “International Women’s Day 2019 – Bridging the Gender Gap in STEM”. The blog post featured comments from five female deep tech startup founders, where they shared their thoughts on gender diversity in the deep tech startup industry.
Campus Magazine published an article on the opportunities for deep tech with SGInnovate. As emphasised by Singapore’s Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat at the SGInnovate second year anniversary, one of the challenges that the local deep tech startup ecosystem faces is finding suitable talent. To that end, SGInnovate launched its first apprenticeship programme known as the Summation Programme in 2018, to connect promising deep tech startups with bright students from both tech and non-tech backgrounds that are currently studying in local and overseas universities. Working for the AI-driven firm Taiger, SUTD apprentice Gabriel Wong was tasked with creating a tool that converts images into text and an engine that could extract specific text from complicated documents. NUS apprentice Jinna Qian, who interned at V-Key, asserts that it was important to stop discouraging women from joining the tech sector. She added that based on her experience, deep tech startups are gender-neutral in terms of work, and both men and women are evaluated equally for the work they have done.
Topics: Talent
Inc ASEAN published an article based on an email interview with Steve, on the three key factors that need to be in place for emerging ASEAN economies to benefit from deep technology. As the ideal hub for deep tech startups, Singapore acts as the jump-off point for deployment for startups to emerging markets. For instance, while Adatos, one of SGInnovate’s portfolio company, is based in Singapore, it works with some of the biggest food producers in Southeast Asia to address a genuine problem in the world – food security. SGInnovate aims to develop deep tech startups into high potential companies with global impact, to build and scale their products from Singapore for Southeast Asia and the world. Steve shares the three key factors that emerging ASEAN economies need in order to benefit from deep tech:
DealStreetAsia published an article based on an interview with Alex Crompton, the Director of EF in Singapore. Crompton discusses how EF’s investment thesis and protocols have evolved since its launch in Singapore, his views on the city-state’s venture ecosystem and its investors, the impact of Brexit on startups and VCs, as well as its talent pool, among other topics. Crompton also talked about EF’s partnership with SGInnovate and the impact of its recent shift based on the ‘Deep Tech Nexus’ strategy announcement. He shared that SGInnovate had contributed to helping them establish and grow EF’s presence in Singapore. He believes that the strategy shift by SGInnovate sends a strong and positive signal to the investment community, giving people the confidence to and provide a significant boost to the ecosystem. Finally, he adds that SGInnovate’s talent building initiative has helped bring more people into the deep tech ecosystem.
MoneyFM 89.3 conducted a live radio interview with Steve Leonard, Founding CEO of SGInnovate. During the interview, Steve gave a brief introduction and background of SGInnovate and reasons for its focus on deep tech. He shared some of the milestones that SGInnovate has achieved since the launch – investing in 29 startups, built a network of more than 1,000 technical individuals interested in joining early-stage tech companies, created and hosted more than 100 events at its premises attracting a total of 9,000 participants. He also addressed some of the challenges typically faced by deep tech startups, such as funding and talent.
Topics: Investments, Startups, Talent
Witness the journey of Steve Leonard to London.
Topics: Talent