Produced by Tiger Sniff Commercial Consumer Group
Author|Zhao Xi, Tiger Sniff is an author stationed in Singapore
Editor|Miao Zhengqing
Header picture丨"Life of Pi"
Tiger Sniff Note: This article is the tenth article in the Singapore Business Observation series "Snowball", focusing on the field of AI venture capital in Singapore.
The "Snowball" series presents the current situation of the subdivided business track, reflects the changes in Singapore's business environment, and provides samples and cases for players of all sizes who go overseas in Singapore. If you are an entrepreneur rooted in Singapore, a company going overseas, or an investor who has been following Singapore for a long time, please continue to pay attention to this series, and you are also welcome to share industry clues.
At a Starbucks in Singapore's central business district, Fiona, who has sun-kissed skin in the tropics, talks to me about her AI products. THE YOUNG CEO, WHO GRADUATED FROM ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY AND WAS BORN IN 1999, FOUNDED GENPULSE IN 2021 AND WENT ALL THE WAY SOUTH TO DIRECTLY ENTER THE VENTURE CAPITAL MARKET IN SINGAPORE, WHICH WAS ONCE NORTH LATITUDE.
GENPULSE AIMS TO DEVELOP THE WORLD'S BEST ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR HAIR. On April 22, 2024, GENPULSE released the Lushair Follicle Smart Precision Scope, which uses image recognition technology and feature domain segmentation model to intelligently analyze scalp images under follicle microscope.
ALTHOUGH THE COMPANY IS REGISTERED IN SINGAPORE, THE SINGAPORE MARKET HAS NEVER BEEN A MAJOR BATTLEGROUND FOR GENPULSE. GENPULSE China is mainly Hangzhou Silk Leap Technology, and ninety percent of its products are sold to China. After the completion of the financing in the second quarter of this year, Fiona will begin to expand into the Australian and North American markets in the third quarter.
ONE OF THE REASONS FOR CHOOSING SINGAPORE IS THAT GENPULSE HAS BEEN INCUBATED BY THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE ACCELERATOR, WHICH WILL RECEIVE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF SOLDS (MORE THAN ONE MILLION YUAN) OF INVESTMENT AT THE END OF THE YEAR. The recognition from Singapore has brought "fame" and "natural traffic" in the Southeast Asian market.
This fledgling AI company is a small microcosm of Singapore's AI startups: they enjoy all the resources that the country brings, and at the same time bear the commercialization challenges caused by the small market, almost without exception, they need to expand. A large number of founders are from other countries, and there are few local entrepreneurs.
Singapore has strong academic capabilities and government support. And due to its unique strategic positioning, Singapore can undertake AI business that some countries cannot undertake and become a global overseas data center. An investor from China who works for a VC in Singapore told Tiger Sniff that more AI companies will land in Singapore in the future.
But for now, Singapore's name is still easy to overlook in the global AI race led by China and the United States. The managing director of a capital in Singapore directly told Tiger Sniff: "China and the United States are relatively strong in AI technology, and the opportunities in Southeast Asia are not particularly large. ”
In short, Singapore seems to have the right time and place in the field of AI, but it faces fierce international competition and challenges in market positioning.
So, what's the problem?
Look for positioning
Singapore is trying to find its own position in the conflicting interests of the two powers, and to demonstrate the advantages of its cooperation in the field of AI.
比如说，2019年1月，新加坡通讯及新闻部（Minister for Communications and Information）部长S. Iswaran 在达沃斯世界经济论坛提出全球首个AI道德框架。
At the same time, Professor Wen Yonggang (Academician of the Singapore Academy of Engineering and Professor of the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, whose research mainly focuses on the research and development of large-scale distributed computer systems and the innovation of related core technologies) told Tiger Sniff that Singapore is relatively short of energy, so it focuses on energy-saving research, and is comparable to Google in using AI to save energy in data centers.
He also said that Singapore is leading the way in the academic field of artificial intelligence. Nanyang Technological University's Data Technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) program, for example, is ranked 8th in the world in the QS University Rankings 2024.
"Singapore's AI talent density is the highest in the world." He recalled that in several famous conferences on artificial intelligence, Singapore, as a country with a small population, generally ranked in the top 4 in terms of the total number of papers published.
But there is too much talent mobility. Many young scholars who are educated and do academic research in Singapore are poached by other countries when they are about to become famous or just after they have achieved fame. For example, Professor Man's colleagues sometimes joke that "Singapore has a big talent deficit in the field of artificial intelligence in Australia." ”
Academic achievement cannot be translated into the business world. An investor told Tiger Sniff that he has been involved in the AI field, but has never invested in an AI project in Singapore. Last year, he talked about a project with excellent papers, and the results were used as references by academia and industry. The reason for not investing is that it is still exploring a feasible path in commercialization.
The Singapore government's support for AI is so strong that it can be called "in person".
On February 16, 2024, Singapore announced its budget for the new year, and the authorities said that they would invest more than S$1 billion (about 5.35 billion yuan) in the next five years for AI computing, talent training and industrial development.
One of the policies in the plan is to sponsor mid-career Singaporeans aged 40 and above to receive S$4,000 (about RMB 21,400) for continuing education from May. MP Tan Yau Meng said that the next 10 years will be a world of AI, so it is necessary to fund Singaporeans to learn how to use AI to improve Singapore's competitiveness.
At the same time, Singapore is committed to attracting the world's top AI creators to work in Singapore, as well as nurturing AI professionals to fully develop the country's AI potential. Under Singapore's National AI Strategy 2.0 (NAIS 2.0), the government will expand Singapore's AI workforce to 15,000 people, creating an iconic base for AI creators and practitioners to work together and nurture Singapore's AI community.
Still, commercially, Singapore is still far from the dream of becoming one of the AI leaders.
Business dilemma
"More and more capital is pouring into Singapore, but the speed and commercialization of the AI industry are still much lower than the speed of capital influx. China is the opposite, and Chinese companies are relatively pragmatic. An entrepreneur said. In particular, entrepreneurs from large Chinese manufacturers not only have strong coding capabilities, but also have very flexible commercial thinking.
This has triggered the grand occasion of China's 100-model war, and it has also produced the chaos of some people who dare to sell courses online without a bottle of water. Such a combination of prosperity and chaos has not happened in Singapore.
"Singapore has a good environment for entrepreneurship and innovation, and government policies are in place, but it is limited by its own market, and its development potential lies in exports to ASEAN." Professor Wen Yonggang said. There are many international companies in Singapore, but none of them have much local business, so they rarely purchase To B application equipment. Most of the purpose of the company is financial security, or relying on Singapore to enter the Southeast Asian market.
"Southeast Asia has one of the fastest AI infrastructure growth in the world. Due to the influence of local politics, Chinese and American companies will go to Southeast Asia to build their own data centers. As a result, AI training is brought together here, and data centers are growing particularly fast. But its market is not here. ”
The Internet in Southeast Asia has not formed a complete market. Unlike China and the United States, which are single markets, Southeast Asia has ASEAN, but its market is very fragmented, which is not conducive to commercial expansion.
According to Tiger Sniff's public information, a Singaporean artificial intelligence voice star startup raised a sum of $30 million on the cusp of 2022, and no financing has been announced since then.
An investor commented: "Today's AI companies are still looking for ways to increase their retail scale and income, and explore monetization models, which are still relatively far from real profits." ”
Mao Hua, founder of PlatoX ai, a Singapore-based startup focused on AI-powered personal assistants, said: "Singaporean companies don't have the opportunity to encounter applications with a large number of users like China, so their experience is not enough. ”
However, local companies are not sensitive to this, and the "aggressiveness" is obviously lower than that of Chinese startups. Fiona mentioned that she has a local brand in Singapore that she has worked with since its inception in 2017 and has only 30,000 users, but is not ready to expand. "There's not a lot of room for imagination."
There are two major challenges to AI entrepreneurship in Singapore: capital and talent.
Professor Wen Yonggang said that there is abundant medium and long-term capital in capital markets such as Singapore, but there is very little capital in the early stage.
Mao Hua also said: "This wave of AI investment seems to be lively and the funds are abundant, but everyone is more cautious, and there are not many people who can really make up their minds to invest." ”
"Cross-river dragons" from other countries are also grabbing investors' attention. Professor Wen Yonggang mentioned that more and more Chinese artificial intelligence companies are coming to Singapore to go overseas. From 2018 to 2022, the AI research departments of companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, SenseTime, and iFLYTEK have all come to Singapore. In recent years, a number of mid-sized and early-stage companies that are close to listing have also begun to flock to Singapore.
Capital observes that such companies have mature technology and complete products, and only need capital injection to roll them directly, and are more inclined to invest in such companies rather than local start-ups in Singapore.
At the talent level, although Singapore's AI academics are strong, the talent volume is obviously insufficient. On the one hand, there is an outflow of academic talent; On the other hand, the willingness of local talents to start a business is low.
Mao Hua's intuitive feeling is that the weak local entrepreneurial atmosphere is due to the fact that the Singapore government takes too good care of its citizens. In other words, the vast majority of Singaporeans can live a happy and stable life without having to work hard in the business world.
A professor of humanities at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore told me that the security of life also makes Singaporeans afraid to take risks, because the risk of accidentally taking a fork in the road in life is difficult for many citizens to accept.
As a result, a lot of the resources provided by Singapore's universities and government for entrepreneurs have fallen into the businesses of foreign entrepreneurs.
An employee of an AI startup founded by a Pakistani founder told me that his company is a partnership with the National University of Singapore and is housed in a government-provided office, with them being the only company on the entire floor.
Web3 inertia and bubbles
"Some projects that combine Web3 and AI don't actually have any users. Although there are no users, the valuation is already very high. The founder and CEO of a Singapore-based Web3 infrastructure company told Tiger Sniff. The unnamed CEO is also an angel investor with a focus on AI.
Singapore, as a rich soil for Web3, has continued its entanglement with Web3 in the AI wave. Many Web3 entrepreneurs smell the smell of AI and make money, and they rush to form a new bubble.
Daniel Zou, founder and CEO of Blueshirt Technology, told Tiger Sniff: "This wave of AI has attracted a large number of practitioners in the technology industry. Everyone is thinking about how to use AI to depict a story, and then send a coin to the chain. ”
Generally, the market will pick up in the first half of the Bitcoin halving. If the supply of bitcoin decreases, but the market demand is still there, the price of bitcoin will rise.
Bitcoin's current bull run originated in October last year. The number of bitcoins was halved, ETFs were approved, and the price of bitcoins soared from $30,000 to $70,000. "After this wave, everyone is looking to see what concepts are worth hype." The CEO of the aforementioned Web3 infrastructure company said, "After OpenAI became popular, investors are looking at what projects combine AI and Web3 better. ”
For example, large models such as OpenAI have the problem of data leakage, and some entrepreneurs have an angle of how to solve the existing data privacy problem through decentralization.
Chainbase co-founder and COO Chris told Tiger Sniff that he thinks the direction in which Crypto and AI can be combined can be broadly divided into two categories. (Chainbase focuses on the combination of on-chain data and AI, through the first full-chain data network it has built, to achieve the interoperability of on-chain data, and based on this data network trained the first industry foundation model built specifically for Crypto Theia, which has an entity in Singapore, has closed a $15 million Series A funding round.) ）
The first is Crypto for AI, which uses Crypto as a tool to solve some problems in the existing AI workflow. For example, in order to cope with the staggering increase in the demand for computing power in the field of AI, decentralized AI has emerged to efficiently solve the problem of computing power matching and lower the threshold for the use of high-quality computing power.
For example, a Tsinghua team that started a business overseas founded NetMind.AI to leverage a large amount of idle computing power around the world, open up the computing power network, and let customers pay to call it.
Kai, founder and CEO of NetMind.AI, told Tiger Sniff that AI and blockchain technology are a very natural combination: "We have been committed to the research of multi-node asynchronous way of training, fine-tuning, and inference. The thing itself is distributed and decentralized. At the same time, through algorithms, we can better use and allocate idle computing power to form a network for our users, and many of the early computing power comes from web3 mining projects such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. ”
At the same time, NetMind.AI has built its own NetMind Layer 1 chain, and hopes to use the blockchain for accounting in the future, so that all information including price and task allocation will be more transparent, and further eliminate the price difference caused by information difference.
The other is AI for Crypto, which uses AI to make the crypto industry widely popular and develop faster.
Chris mentioned that Chainbase, like the well-known Rituals and Bittensor in the industry, belongs to this type of combination: "Bittensor is an open-source protocol that drives the development of AI through a blockchain-driven incentive structure, putting the inference part on-chain and computing off-chain. Chainbase also hopes to create the first crypto native foundation model by using the characteristics of on-chain data development transparency and causal integrity, transforming static on-chain data into dynamic model assets, so that the entire crypto has intelligent capabilities, and further drives the large-scale popularization of the industry. ”
Kai said there are still very few successful business models that combine Web3 and AI. A lot of people are hyping up this concept, but the companies that really create real value "haven't emerged yet".
As the absolute center of Web3, Singapore is still in the initial vacuum of the industry when it comes to combining with AI.
Write at the end
One day after I returned to Beijing, Fiona received a message: "This week, our Leads are coming from Malaysia, Singapore, Brazil, the United States, Australia, Hong Kong, Vietnam, ......"
From the world port of Singapore, young AI startups are able to connect to resources from all over the world. In this global AI race, Singapore, like these young companies, is looking for and consolidating its position.
However, with these huge potentials and resources, Singapore still faces many challenges in terms of commercialization and market expansion.
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