How Singapore’s innovative start-ups create solutions that can have a lasting global impact
- Drug therapy maker Hummingbird Bioscience, data analytics firm PatSnap and Next Gen Foods, producer of meat-free chicken alternative, all benefit from city state’s business ecosystem
- The nation’s more than 3,900 start-ups raised about US$8.1 billion during the first nine months this year – more than twice the total amassed over the same period last year
[Sponsored article]
Entrepreneur Piers Ingram knows the stakes are high for his clinical-stage biomedical start-up, which is working to help find cures for hard-to-treat autoimmune disease and cancers.
The CEO and co-founder of Hummingbird Bioscience set up the company in Singapore with chief scientific officer Jerome Boyd-Kirkup seven years ago to develop precision biotherapeutic products – drug therapies made from living organisms.
Ingram says his company is “still not there yet” in terms of whether its approach will eventually produce results, but he believes that basing Hummingbird Bioscience in the city state has certainly made things easier.
“It takes a village to make a drug,” he says. “It requires so many skill sets, so much patience and, of course, steadfast financial support for the business. And many stakeholders are involved. The key takeaway for us really was that it was relatively straightforward to build what we wanted in Singapore.”
The Seeds Capital portfolio start-up is one of the more than 3,900 start-ups in Singapore tapping into the support of various networks and programmes such as Startup SG Equity to help them achieve success in their respective fields. These companies raised about S$11.4 billion (about US$8.1 billion) during the first nine months this year – more than twice the S$3.5 billion amassed over the same period last year – DealStreetAsia, the Singapore-based financial news website, reported.
PatSnap, an intellectual property (IP) data analytics company with major international technology and pharmaceutical giants among its clients, was one of these, after raising US$300 million in a funding round that involved SoftBank, Tencent, Sequoia China and Vertex Ventures.
Yet its journey to becoming a unicorn – a company with a value of at least US$1 billion – has taken 15 years. Founder Jeffrey Tiong was studying at the National University of Singapore in 2005 when he enrolled on an entrepreneurship programme sponsored by a Singapore government agency. “It was a life-changing programme for me,” he says.
It led to him working at a Philadelphia medical technology start-up, while taking part-time courses at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. During his time there, he learned about IP rights, how start-ups function, how to build business plans, launch products and raise money from investors. He launched PatSnap in September 2007 after returning to Singapore.
Start-ups often struggle to keep going, so Tiong applied for several business grants to ensure it continued to develop. He received a S$55,000 incubation grant from Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority and US$1 million from the VC fund Accel X, with support from Seeds Capital under SPRING Singapore, the former government enterprise development agency superseded by Enterprise Singapore (EnterpriseSG).
“PatSnap, is truly a ‘Made in Singapore’ business,” Tiong says.
Entrepreneurs have also been able to rely on Singapore’s infrastructure to help them scale up their businesses. Platforms such as the Startup SG network – an initiative of EnterpriseSG – connects start-ups to business opportunities and support to help kick-start their growth.
Next Gen Foods, a Singapore start-up that created a plant-based alternative to chicken, was co-founded in 2020 by Timo Recker and Andre Menezes, who set up their business through EntrePass – a visa that allows foreign entrepreneurs to launch a start-up in Singapore. Over the past 18 months, Next Gen Foods has gone from launching its flagship product, TiNDLE, in 15 restaurants in Singapore to more than 1,000 international restaurants, says chief operating officer Alex Ward. It has also managed to attract investors along the way, he adds.
The company plans to open its global research and development (R&D) centre within Singapore’s upcoming S$30 million Food Tech Innovation Centre.
Ward says the move will allow his company to expand its research into proteins and ingredients while improving its products at the facility, which will help food-tech start-ups develop by offering access to its purpose-built infrastructure and facilities including co-working spaces, kitchens, laboratory and testing equipment.
The centre has been set up as part of a collaboration between Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and Nurasa, a firm owned by the government investment company, Temasek.
Elsewhere, Hummingbird Bioscience moved into its new 40,000 sq ft office and research facilities at Singapore Science Park in September this year. Hummingbird Bioscience’s 10 laboratories will be used for studies into biotherapeutics, with functions including pharmacology, mass spectrometry, genomics and microbiology. This move was made possible thanks to funding worth S$177 million from many investors – the largest biotech deal signed in Singapore last year amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Hummingbird Bioscience and the other two start-ups based in Singapore have also benefited from having easy access to the city state’s deep and diverse cosmopolitan culture and highly educated talent pool. Ingram says his firm has been able to call on the skills of drug developers who not only contribute to the biotherapeutics field through Singapore’s research institutes, but also through their work at the city state’s multinational corporations.
Ward says being in Singapore has also helped the international success of Next Gen Food’s TiNDLE product. “We had access to so many chefs and so much expert culinary input in Singapore at the very beginning, which made it easy for us to develop our product quickly because of the diverse food scene here,” he says.
Tiong says the city state’s reputation as a stable, regional and global business hub has helped PatSnap to attract clients. Being a start-up based in a neutral country helped PatSnap to gain the confidence and trust of major corporations, which may not have had access to the same IP and legal safeguards in other countries, he says.
All three companies are looking to the future with growing confidence as part of Singapore’s thriving start-up ecosystem.
Hummingbird Bioscience hopes its research efforts will lead to the creation of successful drugs that receive regulatory approval so that they can benefit many patients, Ingram says. “Undoubtedly, we have shown we can work on these incredibly difficult problems – really important drug targets that have eluded others – and make progress and can move these into the clinical phase,” he says.
Next Gen Foods plans to customise its plant-based alternative to chicken products for sale in Europe and the United States. “I can’t think of a better place to do it than in Singapore,” Ward says. “The infrastructure around R&D and investment here, and really engaged investors who are in it for the long-run … have helped us a lot.”
Tiong says PatSnap has played a useful role in helping one of its international clients, the German pharmaceutical giant BioNTech, understand what medical patents were available while it was developing its crucial mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) vaccine to fight the Covid-19 coronavirus disease. These new types of vaccines, rather than using a live virus to trigger an immune response, teach the cells how to make a protein that will trigger an immune response and lead the body to make antibodies.
He compares PatSnap’s role to that of the fictional “Q” character in the James Bond films, who is head of the R&D division, Q Branch. “Behind the scenes, James Bond has Q who provides him with good weapons and gadgets to help save the world,” Tiong says. “I would say PatSnap is Q for the innovators around the world,” he says. “So, we’ll keep innovating. And through our innovation, new important products will come about that hopefully help address more customers’ needs as well.”