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In 2014, Janson Seah took up a manager role at a bar, where he was given the opportunity to lead the revitalization of the business. During his time there, his biggest challenge was managing shift workers due to the lack of effective tools. Bent on fixing this problem, he brought together a team of problem solvers, which were none other than his best buddies – Jeremy Hon, Lee Kai Yi, and Eugene Ng – whilst in the Bay Area on the NUS Overseas Colleges program. Together, they worked on a school project which eventually evolved into StaffAny – a software-as-a-service (SAAS) innovation that now helps businesses manage their workforce with ease.
Workforce management start-up StaffAny has raised US$3.4 million (S$4.6 million) in a Series A funding round led by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm with US$9.2 billion in assets under management. Founded by a team of alumni from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the NUS Overseas Colleges programme, StaffAny helps businesses with a blue-collar workforce to optimise their staff scheduling, time-tracking and end-of-month time sheet consolidation.
The Business Times, 20 January 2022
The Straits Times, 20 January 2022
TechCrunch, 20 January 2022
Since Phase 2 (Heightened Alert) kicked in with its no dining in restriction, many F&B establishments, especially hawkers, have been struggling due to the reduced footfall. Apart from governmental efforts, a 28-year-old Singaporean user of the Reddit forum who goes by the waffleboy92 handle, launched a crowd-sourced Google Map layer that shows some of digitally-disadvantaged hawkers that have been hit hard to raise their visibility online. The map layer creator is inviting others to contribute to the map to give the digitally-disadvantaged hawkers more exposure. According to his first post published on May 23, the Redditor, whose real name is M Thirukkumaran, was inspired to help local hawkers after reading KF Seetoh's Facebook post. The aim of his initiative is to help those who wish to support digitally disadvantaged hawkers in their vicinity but are unaware of who and where these hawkers are located.
The Covid-19 crisis in India has escalated in the past month, with the country reporting several hundred thousand new cases per day and the total number of cases surpassing two million on May 4. Hoping to raise money to support efforts in the fight against Covid-19 in India, one Singapore-based couple started a dollar-for-dollar matching crowdfunding campaign that has raised more than S$192,000 from donors around the world in just 11 days. Singaporean permanent residents (PRs) Prantik Mazumdar and Dipti Kamath told Mothership that they started the fundraiser because of deep concern for their family, friends, colleagues, and loved ones living in India. Prantik has been been living in Singapore for 20 years, coming here initially to complete his Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering from the National University of Singapore's (NUS) School of Computing. He became a PR in 2007. They decided to provide help from the outside by galvanising and mobilising the Indian diaspora, as well as their friends, colleagues, and network in Singapore, through a campaign on local crowdfunding platform Milaap, which was founded in Singapore by two NUS School of Computing alumni, Anoj Viswanathan and Sourabh Sharma.
It did not happen exactly with a snap of the fingers. It took consistent years of hard work with nurturing and support by NUS Enterprise for PatSnap to be what it is today – a unicorn in business – a company valued at more than US$1 billion. Its R&D intelligence as well as IP intelligence platforms are used by more than 10,000 customers around the world.
Today, its founders, two NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) alumni, can proudly proclaim that they have left their fledgling days far behind when they first formed the start-up in 2007. The company now has offices in the US, the UK, Canada, Japan and China. Its close ties with NUS and access to Singapore’s talent eco-system and dense network of industry partners has enabled it to launch an R&D centre in Singapore three years ago.
In fact, founders Mr Jeffrey Tiong (NUS Engineering, Biomedical Engineering) and Ms Guan Dian (NUS Computing, Information Systems), both previous NUS Outstanding Young Alumni Award winners, have just announced that the company has secured US$300 million in Series E funding. This puts them in unicorn territory, which is reserved for start-ups valued over US$1 billion – a first for NUS-supported start-ups.
NUS News, 18 March 2021
CNA, 17 March 2021
The Straits Times, 17 March 2021
In 2019, Singapore generated around 744 million kg of food waste — that’s equivalent to two bowls of rice per person a day, or around 51,000 double decker buses.
Food wastage is a real problem — it does not only cause environmental problems, but also affects our food security and puts pressure on our resources.
When Preston Wong, 31, saw his family members clearing out excess expiring food items from the refrigerator one day, he wondered if a platform could be built to facilitate a redistribution of surplus food. He pitched the idea to his National University of Singapore (NUS) schoolmate, Kenneth Ham, 30.
The duo didn’t even share the same classes — Preston majored in law and accountancy, while Kenneth majored in computer science — but they knew each other from church.
In their final year at NUS, they decided to take the leap to develop an app to tackle food wastage in Singapore by reducing the amount of buffet food that’s thrown away at the end of the day.
Since July 2014, NUS Computing alumnus and software developer Abraham Yeo has been giving food, drinks and companionship to the homeless in Singapore. Abraham co-founded an informal volunteer group, the Homeless Hearts of Singapore, to rally like-minded people together to conduct night walks and checks on the homeless.
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