Why EDB Is Betting on World-Class Founders to Push Singapore’s Next Growth Story

Singapore’s Economic Development Board spent decades perfecting a model that helped turn a small domestic market into one of Asia’s most important bases for factories, regional headquarters and multinational investment.

Its next playbook is more ambitious and less predictable. The aim is to persuade founders to build global companies from Singapore, connect them to capital and customers and tie that pipeline to the country’s push into artificial intelligence, deep tech and advanced manufacturing.

The old engine is still running. In its 2025 year-in-review, released in February 2026, EDB said it secured S$14.2 billion in fixed asset investment commitments and S$8.9 billion in total business expenditure. About S$12.1 billion of those fixed asset commitments came from manufacturing-related projects, including semiconductor plants linked to demand for AI-related chips, servers and server-related products. The investment commitments, if realised over five years, are expected to create 15,700 jobs and add S$18 billion in value-added annually.

That remains a powerful investment story. Singapore still sells itself as a trusted, stable and well-connected base for companies navigating supply chain disruption, geopolitical fragmentation and Southeast Asia’s long-term growth markets. But EDB’s own report also shows why the model is evolving. Job creation fell from 18,700 in 2024 to 15,700 in 2025, and the agency said structural shifts in the global business landscape will make job creation more challenging.

The answer is not to abandon factories. It is to add founders.

EDB’s Global Founder Programme, launched in April 2025, is designed for serial entrepreneurs, seasoned builders, senior operators and deeptech founders who want to launch or scale their next venture from Singapore.

At launch, the agency said the programme was meant to establish new ventures with the potential to become global industry leaders, supported by Singapore’s technology, research and talent base. The programme offers access to strategic partners, investors, advisers, operational setup support and introductions to potential customers and capital.

By early 2026, the programme had become one of the clearest signs of EDB’s changing role. EDB’s 2025 review said the Global Founder Programme was supporting more than 40 ventures, especially in AI, the green economy and deep-tech hardware. Collectively, those ventures had raised S$1.7 billion in funding, with about a quarter projected to go towards expanding their Singapore operations and partnerships.

That makes the programme more than a startup initiative. It is part of a broader attempt to make Singapore useful earlier in a company’s life. Instead of only attracting a multinational’s regional headquarters after scale has already been achieved, Singapore wants to influence where the founder sits, where the product roadmap is shaped, where the first strategic customers are found and where the next round of capital is raised.

EDB’s own examples show the type of companies it wants to anchor. Arta Finance, an AI-driven wealth platform, worked with the agency to develop and test its B2B strategy for financial institutions. SEAI Technologies, a Singapore-headquartered AI company, provides machine-learning solutions to enterprises across finance, retail and manufacturing.

These are not small local lifestyle startups. They fit Singapore’s preferred founder profile — internationally minded, capital-backed and operating in sectors where regulation, talent and cross-border customers matter.

Singapore already has a dense startup base by regional standards. It ranks fourth globally on StartupBlink’s Global Startup Ecosystem Index 2026, behind the US, the UK and Israel. The Economic Strategy Review counts more than 4,500 tech startups, 220 incubators and accelerators and about 500 venture capital firms.

But the funding mix also shows why Singapore is pushing harder into AI and deeptech. Overall venture funding cooled in 2025, with total deal value down 34% to $4.6 billion, but the money that did flow concentrated in frontier sectors. AI deal value climbed from $1.1 billion in 2024 to $1.4 billion in 2025, doubling its share of total deal value to 31%, according to the Singapore Venture Funding Landscape 2025 report by EY-Parthenon and Enterprise Singapore.

Deeptech funding more than doubled its share of overall deal value over three years, from 11.1% in 2022 to 24.7% in 2025. Fintech remained the largest single draw, taking 36% of total venture funding as its deal value rose 34% to $1.7 billion, and Singapore accounted for 74% of all fintech funding across Southeast Asia’s six largest markets.

The gap is no longer only at the starting line. It is increasingly in the middle of the capital stack, where deeptech companies need larger pools of patient funding to commercialise research, hire specialist teams and expand beyond Singapore. That is why Startup SG Equity, a co-investment scheme run by Enterprise Singapore and EDB, is being topped up by S$1 billion — extended for the first time to support deeptech companies at the growth stage, not only at the seed stage.

Public markets are being pulled into the same effort. During the 2026 budget debate, Alvin Tan, Minister of State for Trade and Industry, announced a second S$1.5 billion push into the Anchor Fund, first set up in 2022 to attract high-quality listings, and a new bridge that will let eligible companies list on SGX and NASDAQ at the same time using a single prospectus. These sit alongside larger state commitments — S$37 billion over five years under the Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2030 plan and more than S$1 billion under the National AI Strategy.

The AI push gives EDB’s founder strategy a sharper edge. In May 2026, Singapore’s Ministry of Digital Development and Information and OpenAI signed their first memorandum of understanding to develop ‘OpenAI for Singapore’. The partnership represents a commitment of more than S$300 million by OpenAI and includes the company’s first Applied AI Lab outside the US, with more than 200 Singapore-based technical roles planned over the next few years.

OpenAI is only one part of the stack. At ATxSummit 2026, Singapore announced new AI collaborations involving OpenAI, Nvidia, Google and other industry partners. Nvidia is setting up a Singapore AI research lab focussed on embodied and efficient AI, while the government and eight industry players are developing a physical AI testbed — robots and sensors operating in real public spaces — in Punggol Digital District. Certis, DHL, Grab and QuikBot are among the first companies expected to test robotics services for food and parcel delivery, cleaning and security patrols.

For EDB, these are not isolated announcements. They are pieces of a new economic-development stack. Advanced manufacturing keeps Singapore plugged into global supply chains. AI labs bring frontier technology, technical roles and applied research. Founder programmes bring company formation. Startup campuses create connective tissue. Growth-capital tools are meant to help companies in Singapore scale.

The broader policy context is set out in Singapore’s Economic Strategy Review. Its 32 recommendations were presented in May 2026, while the final report was released on June 24.

The review says Singapore must foster a more dynamic enterprise ecosystem so that more homegrown companies can start, scale and succeed globally. It also identifies a growth-stage funding gap and recommends expanding access to all forms of private capital such as venture debt, private credit and secondaries, alongside venture capital and strengthening the public equities market.

In fact, the review is unusually direct about why these matter. Singapore has benefited from global multinationals operating from the country, it says, but new firms can now scale quickly and disrupt incumbents in a fast-changing technological landscape. The state must, therefore, support the next generation of high-potential enterprises, both homegrown and global, that could become future industry leaders. Not all of those bets will succeed, the review says, but the winners would be rooted — and likely their founders too — in Singapore.

That sentence captures the heart of EDB’s new challenge. The factory model was easier to measure. Investment commitments, jobs, value-added and manufacturing capacity could be tracked with some precision. But a founder strategy is less linear. Capital can move. Founders can relocate. Startups can use Singapore for incorporation, fundraising or regional sales without building deep operational substance. AI labs can create high-value roles without necessarily creating broad-based employment.

Singapore’s advantage is that it is not starting from zero. It has agencies that can co-ordinate capital, visas, public-sector demand, research institutions, corporates and infrastructure in ways few markets can. Talent facilitation is also part of the toolkit. Founders in the programme may be invited to apply for ONE Pass, Singapore’s pass for top talent, while EDB’s programme materials refer to business setup, hiring and talent facilitation support for founders building teams in Singapore.

But that co-ordination also raises the standard for results. If Singapore is to become more than a convenient regional base, the test will be whether the companies it attracts build real teams, intellectual property, operating depth and global decision-making functions in the country. The next phase of competition is not only for factories or headquarters. It is for founders, technical roadmaps, engineering teams and the capital pathways that decide where future companies grow up.

EDB’s first growth playbook helped Singapore become indispensable to global manufacturing. Its next one is harder. It must prove that a small country can deliberately root the next generation of global companies before they become too large, too footloose or too expensive to anchor.

Footnote: S$ denotes Singapore dollar; $ denotes US dollar

Sources: Economic Development Board; Enterprise Singapore; EY-Parthenon; StartupBlink; Ministry of Trade and Industry; Ministry of Digital Development and Information; Monetary Authority of Singapore; Prime Minister’s Office and the Singapore Economic Strategy Review.