Singapore’s tech start-up scene has grown lately, and the city-state ranked seventh within the newest Global Innovation Index 2022.
Ore Huiying | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Global enterprise {dollars} could have dropped in 2022, however Singapore’s government-owned tech funding agency is optimistic about 2023.
“2023 is probably going to be a pretty decent year for venture capital in Singapore,” Hsien-Hui Tong, govt director of investments at SGInnovate, informed CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” Wednesday.
Unlike international markets extra usually, the enterprise capital scene in Singapore is “still very active,” Tong mentioned. That’s as a result of firms within the nation have a tendency be on the earlier, nascent phases of growth, and “in the seed and Series A stages, there’s still lots of liquidity. There’s lots of capital there,” he added.
Global markets, however, are usually on the “more mature” phases of Series B and C, the place enterprise capital has “dried up a little bit.”
A seed funding spherical — often known as the preliminary funding — is adopted by numerous rounds, referred to as Series A, B, C and so forth.
Venture funding for the primary 9 months of 2022 totaled $369 billion, down 25% yr on yr, in accordance with Crunchbase.
“2022 has been a good year for us, quite unlike some other investment categories. It was a good year for emerging tech startups where a lot of breakthroughs have happened,” Tong mentioned.
For instance, Singapore-headquartered biotech firm MiRXES launched a “T10 ultra-high throughput sequencing platform” — which it says would assist with the early detection of illnesses and precision drugs — in Asia-Pacific final month.
And clean-tech firm SunGreenH2, which raised $2 million led by SGInnovate in August, is conducting trials of its supplies with international electrolyzer producers.
Tong added that Singapore has been “sheltered from a lot of the effects” of world macro financial headwinds. As a end result, Singapore has been in a position to “build up its infrastructure probably a little bit better.”
He additionally named vitality as a sector to observe in 2023 in mild of breakthroughs in nuclear fusion and hydrogen.
“Quantum technology is another area where I think there are going to be some significant announcements and breakthroughs,” he added.
Correction: This report has been up to date to precisely mirror international enterprise funding for the primary 9 months of 2022. An earlier model misstated the determine.