About GEN in Singapore

GEN began working alongside Singapore’s entrepreneurial community in 2008, when the city-state joined 74 other countries as an inaugural participant in the first Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW). GEN president and GEW co-founder Jonathan Ortmans joined Lee Yi Shyan — then Minister of State for Trade and Industry and Minister in charge of Entrepreneurship — at the inaugural opening ceremony at HDB Hub on November 18, 2008, a sign of government backing from the campaign’s first day. Coordinating the campaign, which drew more than 18,000 participants, was the Action Community for Entrepreneurship (ACE) and NUS Enterprise, the entrepreneurial arm of the National University of Singapore. From the outset the campaign emphasized youth and student entrepreneurship, encouraging young Singaporeans to see enterprise as a path and planting the seeds for more than a decade of ecosystem building.

After a brief pause in 2013, GEN’s Singapore campaign relaunched in 2014 under a new national host, MoneyTree, a financial-literacy and entrepreneurship education organization led by Ryan Soh. Working with Bernard Lee, Soh formalized the host role through a memorandum of understanding and rebuilt the campaign’s partner base, recruiting more than twenty organizations — among them Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Management University, Temasek Polytechnic and The Hub Singapore — for that November’s edition. The campaign also brought global competition formats such as Get in the Ring and the Creative Business Cup to a national level, and Minister of State Sim Ann opened the 2014 edition alongside the Innovation Creativity Enterprise Challenge for primary and secondary students.

As the campaign matured, GEN’s Singapore program came to be led by Jayren Teo, an NUS graduate and co-founder of the ASEAN Youth Organization, together with a team of young volunteers who planned and delivered the annual events. In 2017 the campaign marked a decade of GEW in Singapore, and — drawing on SPRING Singapore data — Singapore’s organizers contributed to the first Singapore Startup Ecosystem Map, which charted more than 1,500 stakeholders spanning government agencies, institutes of higher learning, corporates, risk capital and startups. During these years, GEN’s work broadened from raising awareness toward building the connections that help founders scale.

GEN deepened its presence by establishing a national affiliate, GEN Singapore, to carry the work forward on a year-round basis under Jayren Teo’s leadership. The affiliate was created to give local founders a structured link to GEN’s global network of mentors, investors and policymakers, and to close partnerships with government agencies, institutions and corporations that could open market access for Singaporean startups.

A defining thread of GEN’s work in Singapore has been widening access to capital for underrepresented founders. GEN Invest’s Global Business Angels Network (GBAN) includes Epic Angels, the largest all-female angel investor collective in the Asia-Pacific region. Co-founded by Maaike Doyer and Hester Spiegel, Epic Angels has grown to more than 225 members since it launched in 2021 who work to provide capital, mentorship and network access to women-led startups.

Government engagement has been a consistent feature of GEN’s work in Singapore, with the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI), SPRING Singapore — now Enterprise Singapore — and the National Youth Council supporting editions of the week since its 2008 debut. GEN has also carried Singapore’s policy example onto its global platforms: during the 2021 campaign, GEN’s policy series profiled the Startup SG Founder scheme and its i.JAM micro-funding initiative as a model for helping first-time founders access early-stage capital, featuring analysis from GEN senior advisor Christopher Haley.

GEN connects Singapore’s founders to its global programs, most visibly the Entrepreneurship World Cup (EWC), the worldwide pitch competition GEN launched in 2019. GEN Singapore has organized the national EWC each year, building a pipeline to the global finals — TurtleTree, a cell-based milk company, went on to be crowned a global champion, and NDR Medical Technology finished as a global runner-up, with founders such as ProfilePrint, Horangi, SoundEye and, in 2025, Vizzio Technologies advancing from the national stage. At the height of the pandemic in 2020, GEN Singapore launched a Startup Huddle chapter — part of GEN’s peer-driven program of mentor-supported meetups — to counter founder isolation and strengthen the local community.

GEN maintains extensive relationships across Singapore’s ecosystem, working with NUS Enterprise, universities and polytechnics, and corporate partners; the EWC national finals have been hosted at Google’s Asia-Pacific headquarters, and multinationals such as PayPal have run hackathons and pitch competitions within the campaign lineup. GEN Singapore has also grown into a regional coordinating hub, running the EWC’s ASEAN and Indo-Pacific finals that channel startups from some forty economies toward the global competition; its board includes ecosystem investor Alex Lin, former head of SGInnovate and NTUitive, and governance specialist Kitson Lee. The affiliate has widened its reach further by supporting the national MentoringSG platform and securing observer status with the G20 Young Entrepreneurs’ Alliance.

GEN’s president, Jonathan Ortmans, has been a longtime champion of Singapore’s ecosystem, a connection that reaches back to his opening the inaugural GEW campaign in 2008. “Like many global organizations,” Ortmans said, “GEN considers Singapore the Asian capital of the global ecosystem and a vital partner in its work in China and other key Asian markets.” Discussing the region following the Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC) in Melbourne in 2023, Ortmans wrote about the transformation of Asian entrepreneurial economies in the years since GEW began — a story in which Singapore has been a central presence.

GEN Singapore works to link local founders to the knowledge, capital, mentorship and policy support they need to scale through GEN’s global network. As Singapore’s ecosystem matures, GEN is focusing on bridging Singapore’s generational and digital divides — pairing the digital fluency of youth with the experience of older Singaporeans — so that entrepreneurship remains a path open to everyone.