The Institution of Engineers, Singapore (IES) announced that it has selected two more companies to be supported through its Technopreneurship Ecoystem (TES) initiative, making a total of three companies under its portfolio since the launch of the initiative in December 2012, putting it well on track to nurture promising technological start-ups into potential Globally Competitive Companies (GCC).
The three TES companies are Pirate3D in consumer 3D printing, GCore Lab in thermal power management for batteries, and ELET in intelligent LED lighting power management.
“IES provides a platform for aspiring inventors to jumpstart their invention. Through our wide network with various industry partners, IES provides the opportunity for our members and their prodigies to bring their dreams into reality,” said Er. Emily Tan, Chair of IES Technopreneurship & Professional Development Committee. “We will be announcing thematic platform incubation initiatives in the near future.”
A focus of TES is to nurture 10 technological start-ups into GCCs, in support of Singapore’s economic strategy of economic resilience and developing Singaporeans into global business leaders.
An example is Pirate3D, the first IES incubation company that received S$589,000 funding from IES venture fund partner, Red Dot Ventures (RDV) in December 2012; and moved on to raise another US$1,438,765 globally on the crowd-funding Kickstarter platform in June 2013. The two latest start-ups to come under TES, GCore Lab and ELET, will be receiving S$589,000 and S$500,000 respectively from RDV and corporate/angel investors.
To provide insights to IES members and the public on how to run a successful crowd-funding strategy, IES organised a Technopreneurship Talk on “Raising $100K in 10 minutes – Pirate3D’s Kickstarter Experience” on 5 July at Plug-in@Blk71 from 6p – 9pm. The complete founding team of Pirate3D made a full appearance at this event, for the first time after its Kickstarter campaign drew to a close on 29 June 2013. At the talk, the team shared their experience in the development of the world’s most affordable 3D printer – the Buccaneer, the Kickstarter experience from strategies, marketing and operations; as well as their product vision, concept and development, in the hope of inspiring engineers to follow their footsteps.
