It all started with a belief that technology is the single greatest lever to nudge the world towards a better place. That belief brought me home to Singapore from Silicon Valley in 2010, into my first startup role, and eventually, through a series of fortunate detours, into venture capital. Today, as we rename Forge Ventures to Analog Ventures, it feels like the right moment to look back on a decade in this industry, the ecosystem that shaped it, and the founders who made it all worth doing.
Before the Beginning
When I returned to Singapore, the startup scene here was, to put it mildly, primordial. Southeast Asia as a whole received less than $150 million in venture capital that year. There were no unicorns, and precious few people who could explain what a term sheet was. (I was one of them.) The exception was JFDI.Asia, Southeast Asia’s first startup accelerator, which Hugh Mason and Meng Wong launched in 2010 out of sheer conviction that Singapore needed a place where founders could come together. They were early, and they were right.
I spent my first few years in product roles. First at a fintech payments startup called Stream Media funded by Singtel Innov8, then at Evernote, where I was given the improbable task of opening our Singapore office in 2012. (My qualifications: enthusiasm and a willingness to say yes to things I didn’t fully understand.) That Evernote chapter taught me something I carry to this day: there is a particular magic in building something from nothing in a market that doesn’t yet know it needs you.
We grew the regional user base and revenue tenfold. More importantly, I got a front-row seat to the earliest stirrings of what Singapore’s tech ecosystem could become. By 2012 and 2013, things were starting to shift. Grab was founded. Lazada was scaling. Sea (then Garena) was finding its footing. Startup funding in Singapore grew from $80 million in 2010 to over $1 billion by 2015. Something real was happening.
The Leap
In 2016, I made the jump into venture capital full-time as a founding team member of SeedPlus, a seed-stage fund backed by Jungle Ventures, Accel Partners, and Ratan Tata’s RNT Associates. We were writing S$500,000 to S$1 million checks into companies across Southeast Asia, believing that the most important work in venture happened at the very beginning of a company’s life.
This is where things get personal for me: I wasn’t a career financier transitioning into VC. I was an operator who had built products, hired teams, shipped software, and navigated the messy reality of growing a business in Asia. That background shaped everything about how I approached investing. I wasn’t interested in financial engineering. I wanted to partner with founders at the hardest stage of their journey, the analog stage, before the playbook exists, before the metrics are clean, before anyone else believes.
Those early SeedPlus years produced some of my most formative experiences as an investor. I backed Nicki Ramsay at CardUp when she was building a way for anyone to pay rent and taxes by credit card, a deceptively simple idea that required navigating Southeast Asia’s fragmented payments landscape. CardUp would eventually be acquired by Funding Societies. I led our investment in Harshet Lunani‘s Qoala at the pre-seed stage and stayed on the board through Series C led by PayPal Ventures, watching it grow from a scrappy insurtech experiment into one of the region’s largest digital insurance platforms, now operating across Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. I worked with the team at EngageRocket, and with Rukita in Indonesia as they pioneered co-living for a new generation of urban renters. Every single one of these companies reinforced a conviction that has never wavered: the best venture capital is concentrated, high-conviction, and deeply personal.
Growing Pains
The years between 2017 and 2021 were remarkable for Southeast Asian tech. Grab merged with Uber’s regional operations. Sea went public on the NYSE. Indonesia’s GoTo emerged from the merger of Gojek and Tokopedia. Funding poured in from SoftBank, Sequoia, Tiger Global, and a wave of global capital that discovered Southeast Asia’s 700 million consumers. It was exhilarating and, in hindsight, dangerously intoxicating. Valuations inflated. Seed rounds that should have been $1-2 million became $5 million. The math stopped making sense, but nobody wanted to say so. We were all too busy congratulating each other at demo days. I left SeedPlus in early 2021 and co-founded Forge Ventures in partnership with Analog Capital. Our thesis was simple and, at the time, somewhat contrarian: venture capital should be concentrated, high-conviction, and deeply personal. We wanted to lead seed rounds, take board seats, and do the hard work of company building, not spray capital across dozens of bets hoping the power law would bail us out. Then came the correction. Interest rates rose. Public markets punished unprofitable growth. The global funding winter hit Southeast Asia hard, and governance scandals like eFishery sent shockwaves through the ecosystem, forcing a long-overdue conversation about founder discipline and board oversight.
What the Founders Taught Me
Paradoxically, the toughest years in the ecosystem produced some of the strongest companies I’ve worked with. Through our first fund at Forge, I had the privilege of backing Tom Duncan and Rajiv Chandna at Envisso, two ex-Grab veterans who saw that payment providers were managing merchant credit risk the same way banks did in the 1990s: manually, with collateral, and with enormous blind spots. Envisso now serves global payment companies across 34 countries. They didn’t build for Southeast Asia. They built from Singapore for the world.
That pattern, Singapore as launchpad not ceiling, kept showing up. In Indonesia, Yann Schuermans and the Baskit team built a B2B supply chain platform that hit profitability within two years of operations. Not by raising more capital, but by obsessing over unit economics in one of the hardest logistics environments in the world, empowering thousands of wholesalers and distributors across Java rather than trying to replace them. And Prefer is rethinking one of the world’s most beloved commodities, coffee, from the ground up, developing bean-free alternatives to address the existential threat climate change poses to traditional coffee production.
These are the founders I show up for every day. A decade in venture has left me with a few convictions I hold tightly. The seed stage is where venture capital creates the most value. Singapore’s role in this ecosystem is evolving in the right direction, with the best founders now building globally ambitious companies from day one. And governance matters more than growth. The companies that survive are the ones who treat governance as a feature, not a burden.
Why Analog
Which brings me to the name change. We founded Forge Ventures in partnership with Analog Capital. Today, we’re evolving, but our core philosophy remains unchanged. The name reflects a belief that first principles always matter, regardless of how technology and markets shift. Cycles come and go. Hype inflates and deflates. But the fundamentals of building a great company never change: solve a real problem, build something people need, manage your capital wisely, and treat governance as a feature. That’s analog work. It requires intellectual honesty, a long-term lens, and a team sport mentality. With Wing Vasiksiri joining as GP and a growing team around us, Analog Ventures is better positioned than ever to do this work.
Looking Ahead
I remain optimistic about the future of entrepreneurship in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Not the reckless optimism of 2021, but a grounded, clear-eyed optimism rooted in what I’ve seen over the past decade. The region now has something it lacked ten years ago: a generation of founders and operators who have been through the cycle. People who built companies during the boom, survived the bust, and emerged sharper. People who understand that building a great company is not about raising the most capital. It’s about creating something durable.
Two patterns give me particular confidence. The first is the emergence of repeat founders. Kenneth Lou built Seedly into one of Singapore’s largest personal finance communities, exited to ShopBack, and is now applying that same builder’s instinct to preventive healthcare at Mito Health. Gabriel Lim founded Saleswhale, an AI sales automation platform, and is now channeling that technical depth into building Singapore’s first virtual power plant at Blue Whale Energy. These aren’t first-time founders figuring it out. They’re operators who have already been through the crucible of building, scaling, and exiting, and have chosen to do it again in entirely new domains. That kind of founder didn’t exist in Singapore a decade ago.
The second is a new wave of Singapore-to-global companies. A decade ago, “building from Singapore” usually meant building for Singapore or for the neighbouring region. Today, the best founders here are treating the city-state as a launchpad for global products from day one, competing not against regional peers but against the best in the world. That shift is generational, and it changes everything about the opportunity set.
AI is accelerating this in ways I find genuinely exciting. The cost of building software has collapsed. A two-person team in Singapore can now build what used to require twenty. The founders we’re backing today are leaner, more technically capable, and more globally minded than ever before.
And the supply gap at seed stage in Singapore, the very gap that Forge was built to fill, is if anything wider now. The opportunity for a disciplined, founder-centric, lead seed investor is as compelling as it’s ever been. It all comes back to that original belief. Technology is the single greatest lever to nudge the world towards a better place. The founders doing that nudging are who we exist to serve.
Here’s to the next 10 years.
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