One North Stories

This is One North Stories, an A*START CENTRAL PodcastIt's been an exciting year at One North Stories. Launched April 2023, we've had 70+ voices across 38 episodes telling deep tech stories. We are regrouping for season 2. Enjoy this conversation between Reuben and Pei Ling as our season 1 wrap and brief preamble for season 2.Thank you for listening. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts.Check out A*START CENTRAL (Website, LinkedIn)If you have future episode ideas, segments ideas or want to partner with us on this exciting journey, please get in touch: onenorthstories@hq.a-star.edu.sg

This is One North Stories, an A*START CENTRAL PodcastYang Liu and TY Shao join to share about MetaTrustLabs.  The Singapore based start-up is building security tools and code auditing services for Web3, protecting information, data and most importantly money as the web decentralizes across the blockchain.  Yang Liu represented the team through the Slingshot 2023 competition at SWITCH, making the finals in the Transformative Digital Technologies category.Founded out of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), they have built AI based platform technology to assist developers understand vulnerabilities in their code (MetaScan) plus continuous security monitoring for smart contract vulnerabilities (MetaScout).  The software is deployed and is used by companies and the Whitehat hacker community as well.The cofounders are planning big things for the company.  Security is eternal, but with blockchain and AI are looking to grow beyond as well.Learn more about MetaTrustLabs, Yang Liu, TY Shao, and the amazing work they are doing:MetaTrustLabs (Website) MetaTrustLabs (LinkedIn)MetaTrustLabs (X (/twitter))Yang Liu (LinkedIn)TY Shao (LinkedIn)Thank you for listening. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts.Check out A*START CENTRAL (Website, LinkedIn)If you have future episode ideas, segments ideas or want to partner with us on this exciting journey, please get in touch: onenorthstories@hq.a-star.edu.sg

This is One North Stories, an A*START CENTRAL PodcastGayathri Natarajan joins to share about KrossLinker.  The Singapore based start-up that is advancing insulation through materials innovation.  Specifically, they have developed a production platform for aerogel manufacturing which enables this amazing material to be produced more cost effective.  Their first application is for cold chain solutions and are also developing solutions for the Built Environment, first with surface paints and then looking to get into specialized applications. Gayathri represented the company through the Slingshot 2023 competition at SWITCH, making the finals in the Consumer Media, Goods & Services category.Gayathri, who has a Chemical Engineering background, wanted to take technology to market.  In 2019, she joined the Entrepreneur First program in Singapore, with a loose outline of trying to do something at the intersection of materials and energy.  She met her co-founders, decided on trying to solve the Aerogel production problem and founded KrossLinker.Learn more about KrossLinker, Gayathri and the amazing work they are doing:KrossLinker (Website) KrossLinker (LinkedIn)Gayathri Natarajan (LinkedIn)Thank you for listening. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts.Check out A*START CENTRAL (Website, LinkedIn)If you have future episode ideas, segments ideas or want to partner with us on this exciting journey, please get in touch: onenorthstories@hq.a-star.edu.sg

This is One North Stories, an A*START CENTRAL PodcastMoores Law may be ending, but Richard Feynman told us: There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom. Let me subtly add: there’s plenty of physics there too, both for silicon and beyond.Where is the future of compute going? Silicon? Yes, that's the near future. Beyond Silicon? Beyond 2 states per bit? Workload specific compute? We're already there, somewhat.This episode is trying something a little different. Deep Tech being cooked up in Singapore's labs. A new switching device, the Skyrmion Magnetic Tunnel Junction. It's electrically switched, fabricated on a silicon substrate and oh yeah, has an ultra low switching energy, is non-volatile and can have more than two states per cell. Join us for a conversation with James Lourembam, Ho Pin, and Chen Shaohai of IMRE, an A*STAR Research Institution. This is instigated by the team's (led by Anjan Soumyanarayanan), work being published in the journal Nature.Prepare to have your mind blown. Ok maybe not yet, but my colleagues have fantastic results to share with the World.Find the original article at Nature.Chen, S., Lourembam, J., Ho, P. et al. All-electrical skyrmionic magnetic tunnel junction. Nature 627, 522–527 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07131-7Thank you for listening. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts.Check out A*START CENTRAL (Website, LinkedIn)If you have future episode ideas, segments ideas or want to partner with us on this exciting journey, please get in touch: onenorthstories@hq.a-star.edu.sg

This is One North Stories, an A*START CENTRAL PodcastJae Kim joins to share about Bering Lab.  The Korean based start-up is a language technology company with the starting niche of precision translation for the legal profession.  Their AI powered translations enable high precision translation between English and Korean, Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Spanish and Bahasa. Jae represented the team through the Slingshot 2023 competition at SWITCH, placing second overall, coming out of the Transformative Digital Technologies Category.Bering Lab, founded in 2020 has an absolutely fantastic back story, starting in 2012 with the founding of a legal translation agency.  As the 2010’s progressed, they saw the writing on the wall and having a high precision dataset, started building a high precision Korean to English, English to Korean translation model.  By 2020, they knew they had a world leading model, gaining recognition at the World Machine Translation Championships.  Today, the company offers 8 languages and continue building their translation models, looking to leverage zero shot learning to add further capabilities.Today, Bering is disrupting from within.  The AI language technology forms the backbone of their translation agency service.  Long term, they are looking for larger network effects, proliferating their translation technology to be a ubiquitous back end capability for professional services.Learn more about Bering Lab, Jae, the self serve portal and the amazing work they are doing:Bering Lab (Website)Bering Lab (LinkedIn)Jae Kim (LinkedIn)Thank you for listening. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts.Check out A*START CENTRAL (Website, LinkedIn)If you have future episode ideas, segments ideas or want to partner with us on this exciting journey, please get in touch: onenorthstories@hq.a-star.edu.sg

This is One North Stories, an A*START CENTRAL PodcastAbhishek Agrawal joins to share about Kinexcs.  They are a digital therapy and wearables company looking to help healthcare providers and individuals measure, track and improve their musculoskeletal health.  Abhishek represented the team through the Slingshot 2023 competition at SWITCH, placing third overall, coming out of the Health and BioMedical Category.Kinexcs, founded in 2017, brought their first product to market, KIMEA Recover, to help patients recover from knee surgery.  The wearable device has been developed into a full stack solution to help patients and their healthcare teams track recovery while reducing post operation visits and complications.  Beyond this, they have developed and launched KIMEA Assess as an AI driven musculoskeletal health assessment tool, to be used for regular health check-ups.  These are opening acts and Abhishek and team look to build Kinexcs into a global power in this space.Learn more about Kinexcs, Abhishek and the amazing work they are doing:Kinexcs (Website)Kinexcs (LinkedIn)Abhishek Agrawal (LinkedIn)Thank you for listening. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts.Check out A*START CENTRAL (Website, LinkedIn)If you have future episode ideas, segments ideas or want to partner with us on this exciting journey, please get in touch: onenorthstories@hq.a-star.edu.sg

This is One North Stories, an A*START CENTRAL PodcastWilliam (Billy) Hanes, Wyle Solomon and Adam Williamson join to share about Somnial.  They have developed and are testing a bioelectronic, wearable device as an alternative to the CPAP machine.  Wyle represented the team through the Slingshot 2023 competition at SWITCH, garnering judges support as one of two finalists in the Health and BioMedical Category.Somnial, founded in 2022 is undergoing clinical trials and the team is working to downsize the driving electronics.  This is envisioned as electronic patches for nerve stimulation driven by an electronics box. It moves the tongue to open a breathing pathway.  Sleep Apnea is estimated to affect 1 billion people worldwide and represents a huge market, but this is just the beginning for Somnial’s technology.Learn more about Somnial, Billy, Wyle, Adam and the amazing work they are doing:Somnial (Website)Somnial (LinkedIn)William (Billy) Hanes (LinkedIn)Wyle Solomon (LinkedIn)Adam Williamson (Google Scholar)Thank you for listening. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts.Check out A*START CENTRAL (Website, LinkedIn)If you have future episode ideas, segments ideas or want to partner with us on this exciting journey, please get in touch: onenorthstories@hq.a-star.edu.sg

This is One North Stories, an A*START CENTRAL PodcastRick Hodgeson joins to share about EMROD.  Rick joined EMROD in 2023 as Strategy and Commercial Manager and represented the team through the Slingshot 2023 competition at SWITCH.Founded in 2019, in New Zealand, EMROD is working on long range power transmission with virtual wires.  Specifically, they convert electricity to microwave energy, beam it from one antenna array to another and convert it back to electricity with core IP in the beam forming and high efficiency transmission.  It’s proven over 10’s of meters.  They are planning pilot projects to show commercial use cases with an ultimate goal of from earth to satellite to earth, leveraging renewable electricity and peak-shaving across the globe.Learn more about EMROD, Rick and the amazing work they are doing:EMROD (Website)EMROD (Youtube)EMROD (LinkedIn)Rick Hodgeson (LinkedIn)Thank you for listening. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts.Check out A*START CENTRAL (Website, LinkedIn)If you have future episode ideas, segments ideas or want to partner with us on this exciting journey, please get in touch: onenorthstories@hq.a-star.edu.sg

This is One North Stories, an A*START CENTRAL PodcastChoon joins to share about ImmunoScape, a Singapore biotech start-up building a TCR discovery platform and therapeutics pipeline with a focus on TCRs to fight solid tumors.  Choon started his career in the Singapore Armed Forces.  He pursued his MBA at the University of Michigan after which he joined the pharmaceuticals industry, first in the USA and then back in Singapore and across Asia.  He joined A*STAR to lead the Pharmaceuticals and Biologics cluster.  After some time, the calling of industry came again, and he started looking for technologies and partners to spin out a company.  He met Alessandra Nardin, Michael Fehlings and Evan Newell.  ImmunoScape was formed in 2017, originally doing immune profiling projects for pharmaceutical companies.  Realizing their strengths in TCR based therapeutics discovery, they changed their approach, building up a TCR discovery platform with a tight feedback loop between wet chemistry and machine learning.  Spanning across Singapore and the USA, Choon is quite pragmatic about steering ImmunoScape, their IP assets, technology and partnerships.  The ultimate goal is to bring safe and efficacious drugs to patients as quickly as possible.Learn more about Choon, ImmunoScape and the amazing work they are doing:Choon (LinkedIn)Immunoscape (LinkedIn)Immunoscape (Website)Thank you for listening. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts.Check out A*START CENTRAL (Website, LinkedIn)If you have future episode ideas, segments ideas or want to partner with us on this exciting journey, please get in touch: onenorthstories@hq.a-star.edu.sg

This is One North Stories, an A*START CENTRAL PodcastJax Lee joins to share about Nanolumi.  Nanolumi is an advanced materials start-up delivering innovative luminescence solutions and products with a current emphasis on product authentication and supply chain security (via Reyal) and bio sensing/ imaging (via Luminicell).  Jax spent the first part of his career working in start-ups, learning the ropes.  He met his two co-founders and together, they started Nanolumi in 2018, originally looking to bring perovskite nanocrystal technology to market for displays.5 years into the journey, Nanolumi is shipping SKU style products and delivering custom solutions. They are always looking for new materials and processes to deliver the best solutions for the customers’ need.  Given their extensive expertise and on-premises labs, they can function as a nanomaterials MVP (minimum viable product) studio for the research community looking to raise the TRL of their ideas too.Learn more about Jax, Nanolumi and the amazing work they are doing:Jax LeeNanolumiThank you for listening. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts.Check out A*START CENTRAL (Website, LinkedIn)If you have future episode ideas, segments ideas or want to partner with us on this exciting journey, please get in touch: onenorthstories@hq.a-star.edu.sg