Financial Support

Available Grants

We administer and support our start-ups with various grants to boost their product development and market readiness. Click on each grant to learn more about them.

Name of Funding Funding Agency Quantum Stage Eligibility About
Baby Shark Fund SUTD VIE $6,000 Pre-Incorporation / Innovation Level SUTD Undergraduates and Masters students Innovation grant that support budding innovation stemming from class projects, ground up initiatives and entrepreneurship from students.
Startup SG Founders Grant SUTD VIE x EnterpriseSG $50,000 Post-Incorporation All Innovation grant for first-time entrepreneurs
Create4Good Innovation Fund SUTD VIE $50,000 Pre-Incorporation All Innovation grant for aspiring social entrepreneurs
Decentralized Gap Funding SUTD VIE $250,000 Pre-Incorporation Researchers, Faculty Research Commercialisation Grant to build your Proof-of-Concept
Research Translation Innovation Platform Fund SUTD TTO $25,000 Pre-Incorporation Researchers, Faculty Research Commercialisation Grant to validate your solution
Enabling Lives Initiative Grant SGEnable $250,000 Incorporated All Innovation grant for aspiring social entrepreneurs
raiSE VentureForGood Grant raiSE $300,000 Incorporated All Innovation grant for aspiring social entrepreneurs
Startup SG Tech Grant (POC) EnterpriseSG $250,000 Incorporated All Research Commercialisation Grant to build your Proof-of-Concept
Startup SG Tech Grant (POV) EnterpriseSG $500,000 Incorporated All Research Commercialisation Grant to build a working prototype
SMART Innovation Grant SMART IC $800,000 Pre-Incorporation Researchers, Faculty Research Commercialisation Grant to demonstrate your Proof-of-Concept and launch

Open to all

Startup SG Founders Grant

Launch a Start-Up

SUTD is an Accredited Mentor Partner of Enterprise SG. We recommend an equity-free innovation grant of up to $50,000 for ready teams with innovative business ideas; supporting first-time founders with mentorship and starting capital.

  • At least 2 SC/PR applicants who

    • Are first-time founders (i.e. have no prior Private Limited entity on ACRA).

    • Are key decision makers and contribute meaningfully to the company.

    • Are not employed externally and who are able to commit full time to the company.

      • External employment is where employers, contribute CPF for their employees (apart from the entity recipient of the Startup SG Founder grant). Full-time National Service is considered employment.

      • Full time commitment is not fulfilled if applicant is engaged in studies or part-time work (i.e. Students with ongoing academic commitments are not considered full-time committed to the company).

    • Have undergone entrepreneurship training.

    • Hold equity in the company, with a minimum of 30% collectively.

    1. Differentiated Business - How novel the idea / product / business model / process is, compared to what is available in the market.

    2. Feasibility of Business – Whether the revenue model is sustainable.

    3. Management Team – Whether the founding team demonstrate the passion and entrepreneurial spirit, and have undergone entrepreneurship training for the relevant technical and business skill to execute the idea.

    4. Potential Market Opportunity – How large the size of the target market is, and how the company intends to reach out to its customers segments.

    1. Not have received funding from another government organisation (for the same business idea)

    2. Not have received the Startup SG Founder grant before

    3. Have minimum 51% of issued shares are owned by Singapore Citizen / Permanent Resident

    4. Invest a co-matching amount of S$20,000 as paid-up capital on ACRA (Have at least $10,000 as paid-up capital on ACRA at the point of application to EnterpriseSG.

    • We accept applications year-round.

    • Share with us your ideas at entrepreneurship@sutd.edu.sg and we will get back to you.

For SUTD-Affiliated Teams

Create4Good
Innovation Fund

Create Social Impact

Create Social Impact

An equity-free social innovation grant of up to $50,000 which supports start-ups that seek to reduce inequality in Singapore and the region.

  • Teams should complete the Create4Good Innovation Fund programme to satisfaction and be shortlisted by a panel to receive the funding.

    Other eligibility criteria include:

    1. Have at least 1 cofounding member with SUTD affiliation (current students, alumnus, researchers, past-program participants)

    2. Team of between 3 and 5 members

    3. Have not incorporated the project but has the intention to do so within the near future.

  • 1. Financial Sustainability

    2. Problem-Solution Fit

    3. Addresses UN SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities

    1. The grant shall be disbursed over a 12-month period.

    2. There will be no disbursement after 12 months.

    3. The grant disbursed is subject to the completion of progress milestones stipulated in the letter of award.

    4. The project should not have received more than S$50,000 in funding.

    5. To be considered an SUTD affiliate, members would have to have attended a prior entrepreneurship programme or event organised by SUTD VIE.

    6. SUTD shall take into consideration the individual’s commitment to the programme.

    • Teams will have to complete the Create4Good Innovation Fund program held in September of every year. Upon completion, the team will be notified of their outcome for the grant after the program.

For SUTD Researchers and Faculty

Decentralized Gap Funding

Commercialise Research

A research commercialization grant of up to $250,000 for early-stage development of promising inventions, technological innovations and entrepreneurial projects.

  • 1. SUTD IP should form the core of the business

    2. The project should not be or have been the main focus of an incorporated company.

    3. Principal Investigator leading the team should be a faculty member. Team members could include students/ alumni/ researchers and/or external parties.

  • 1. Commercialisation Potential

    2. Technical Innovation

    3. Capability of the Management Team

    4. Effective Project Outcomes

  • 1. Project teams that are awarded the grant are required to join the Accelerating Research & Innovation for SUTD Entrepreneurs (ARISE) programmes.

    2. Awarded funds are subjected to indirect research cost and will be disbursed through reimbursements

    3. Funds are to be utilized according to the list of fundable items and within the awarded project duration

    4. SUTD reserves the right to make any changes to any guidelines and submission templates.

    • We accept applications year-round. Share your ideas with us at entrepreneurship@sutd.edu.sg so we can better understand and support your project!

    • Next Evaluation in: APRIL 2024

    • Application Process:

    1. Complete the attached Proposal Template and accompanying presentation deck.

    2. Send the completed Proposal Template, Technology Disclosure (if applicable) and presentation deck to entrepreneurship@sutd.edu.sg

    3. An email confirmation will be sent to notify that your proposal has been received. If you did not receive any confirmation email, please check in directly with entrepreneurship@sutd.edu.sg

    4. We will inform the shortlisted eligible teams to present to an evaluation panel.

    5. Successful applicants will be directly contacted via email.

Past Gap Projects

🟫 Smart Cities

🟧 Manufacturing

🟨 Education

🟦 Healthcare

🟪 Security

🟩 Sustainability

Additive Manufacturing / Advanced Materials

  • Castomize is a new med-tech startup that uses proprietary advanced manufacturing methods to create orthopaedic casts that are lighter, stronger, and more comfortable.

  • The perfusable knit (PK) is a flexible and customizable knitted platform that can store, transfer, and release liquid materials contained inside. The liquid materials are part of the knitted structures and thus enable us to carry, use and release them in and with textiles. PK allows the fabrication of meter-scale multi-material perfusable textiles combining a varied array of yarns with elastomeric tubes using industrial knitting machines.

    This technology will present a new avenue of “wearing liquid”. It will provide unprecedented opportunities in apparel, personal care, hygiene and logistics industries with textile-based materials integrated with advanced liquid-handling ability.

  • A flexible knitted circuit solution with potential applications in health and sports tech wearables. Circuits are knitted into fabric providing unrivalled breathability and flexibility that greatly improved the user experience compared to traditional wearables.

  • Digital Gastronomy is committed to providing the best quality of food and service to improve the quality of life of our elderly community in Singapore. Digital Gastronomy seeks to heighten the dining experience for dysphasia patients in elderly homes and hospitals. Our 3-D food printing technology provides various delicious, nutritious and visually appealing meals, catering for patients’ dignity.

  • An advanced multi-material 3D Printer which offers a high-resolution printing system that can print complex geometries with intricate textures up to 100 microns in resolution. In addition, the 3D Printer's user-friendly hardware, software, and user interface facilitates fast design iterations of complex features to create bespoke components that otherwise would require a great deal of expertise to fabricate.

  • The rapidly escalating global CO2 levels arising from essential economic and human activities result in dangerous global consequences—significant efforts in decarbonization focus on point-source carbon capture. CarbonBits aspires to contribute to decarbonization in urban spaces through distributed direct air capture. Not deterred by the considerably more dilute carbon concentration outside of point sources, CarbonBits views that “every bit” of carbon counts.

    The De-Carbonizer, a 1st generation low footprint device that captures and releases CO2 on demand, has been developed. This pioneering technology seeks to expand the circular carbon economy by closing the loop between capture and utilization. Our product is based on a proprietary material that requires less space and energy and is versatile enough for ready integration into urban or confined spaces. The possibilities for this technology are endless – including air quality management, urban farming, carbon trading and much more.

  • Tensile Ventures is a start-up that develops aesthetically unique, free-spanning membrane structures. Leveraging research from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), the company creates design tools and unique structures with digital simulation and design tools. We work with established partners to produce highly customizable shelters for events, recreation, and other applications using patent-pending Membrane Tensegrity Shell structures and in-house design-to-fabrication workflow.

  • A passive suction enhanced nose pads for spectacles.

  • The technology to control the environment and conditions in which different plant species are grown, by the amateur and the commercial farms

Electrical &
Electronics

  • High-speed electrical impedance characterization at the single-cell level and on-demand single-cell imaging activated by impedance analysis, which can be used for antimicrobial resistance testing.

  • Puriogen is a size-based cell purification instrument developed explicitly for cell washing and isolation. It allows rapid sample processing (i.e., 1 ml sample within 5 mins), high-resolution cell sorting with size difference down to 0.5 m, low cell loss (i.e., < 5%) and up to 5 times cell concentration. In addition, size-based cell purification can produce uniform single-cell suspension and minimize cell clumping.

    Puriogen is a benchtop and centrifuge-free cell sample preparation tools for all downstream analysis, such as flow cytometry, molecular detection and single-cell sequencing.

  • ezyMRI provides a point-of-care MRI solution to the head and other extremities. It is compact, movable, and low-cost. We aim to decentralize MRI scans and offer MRI to under-resourced areas.

  • GlucoRing is a wearable that provides non-invasive and continuous glucose measurements: in which healthy users can regularly monitor their health, while patients will no longer be required to prick their fingers to undergo testing.

  • Cardio-ezyT2* proposes a Point-of-care Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Apparatus to measure Cardiovascular T2* for the early diagnosis of myocardial iron overload. It provides significantly cheaper scans and portability, which allows scans to be done while patient is having blood transfusion and helps to minimize additional hospital visits.

  • With the advent of 5G and ever-increasing high data rate and highly connected applications, there has been a rapid growth in the IoT sector. The IoT sector is expected to connect 500 billion devices by 2030 in various application areas such as home, industrial, automotive, smart office, smart city with an overall economic impact of $4tr to 11tr by 2025. Though the IoT has the potential to transform the wireless sector, improving the quality of the connectivity allowing high quality communication between devices and reducing the power budget is a major criterion.

    In this project, an embedded RF communication interface with ultra-low-power consumption WSNs which are backbone of the IoT devices will be developed. The design incorporates energy aware transceiver design from SUTD and baseband design from MPics Innovations Pte Ltd. This integrated System-on-Chip solution offers a low cost, high reliability, and energy aware combo chip for wireless sensor networks. This solution, together with sensors such as UV-C, will provide the close-loop that current solutions like the UV-C dis-infective robots do not have. With a close-loop solution that enables self-calibrating and self-monitoring system, the UV-C RF IoT sensor card can be widely deployed with cleansing robots or system.

    Possible target markets are the venues with high touches and human traffics such as

    • Healthcare: Hospitals, polyclinics, private clinics

    • Education: Lecture theaters, classrooms, research labs, school canteens

    • Hospitality: Hotel rooms, meeting places, banquet halls

    • MICE: Conference halls, exhibition halls, shopping malls

    • Transport: Public buses, mass rapid transport, passenger airplane, cruise ship

    • Food & Beverage: F & B outlets

    • Aviation: Airports

  • Mimicare aims to develop a system to assist physiotherapists, patients, and their Next-of-Kins (NOKs) with rehabilitation. From market research and interviews, we discovered that the lack of patient compliance is a common problem in rehabilitation. High treatment costs and the high workload of therapists also add to the problem facing therapists, patients, and NOKs in rehabilitation treatment.

    As such, we aim to create a wearable foot pressure monitoring and comparison system to help in patient compliance, reduce treatment costs by reducing treatment frequency, and reduce therapists’ workload through patient progress tracking.

  • Selective and controlled removal of ions which can be applied in various use cases such as water treatment, recovery of dialysate and water treatment.

  • Silence Laboratories is a young company based in Singapore founded by PhDs and alums from MIT, USA, SUTD, Singapore and IITs, India. We envision a world with effortless, intelligent and context-aware security. SL has designed unique, first-of-its-kind multi-modal multi-factor authentication frameworks to support ultra-fast and hassle-free authentication.

    The framework has found niche use cases in seamless two-factor authentication for logins, verifications of passengers and riders in urban mobility and infrastructure access authentications. We aim to make smartphones a ubiquitous digital passport in the digital realm. No need to remember, type or store secrets- walk into the digital realm, and we will do the rest silently.

  • Sales of counterfeit goods total $2.8 Trillion yearly, causing 100,000 deaths worldwide. MetaTag offers the next-generation anti-counterfeiting platform leveraging optical metasurfaces. Utilizing nanotechnology and the physics of metasurfaces, we have developed machine-readable security tags engineered on the nano-level rendering them nearly impossible to duplicate.

  • ARgon redefines the conventional riding style by providing customers value through the convenience of information to ensure their safety through a technology-enable helmet attachment. With ARgon, motorcyclists now have the opportunity to prevent an accident that might be an effect of others’ negligence, an opportunity previously unavailable.

  • Utilizing microfluidics for rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing

  • Sunventus overcomes many of the shortcomings associated with other domestic renewable energy and creates something truly innovative which capitalises on the power of both the wind and the sun.

  • A socially interactive architectural robotic that reacts to users’ anxiety level and counteracts it by attracting their focus to encourage relaxation.

Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning

  • AHEM is a cough screening tool that uses audio signal processing coupled with machine learning, providing children an early indication of asthma, lower and upper tract respiratory infection.

  • Lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) currently require clinical Uroflowmetry assessment to diagnose and track for treatment and recovery. Current Uroflowmetry assessment at specialist clinics requires patients to void ‘on-command’ (in a foreign environment), limiting the efficacy of clinical evaluation.

    Auroflow is a solution that determines uroflow data from audio recordings collected while voiding in the home context, which is more natural for the patient and allows frequent and regular assessments. Integrating a suite of hardware, software and mobile app, we then support clinicians with improved patient monitoring in the home, providing a new paradigm in remote urology care.

  • A solution which provides 24/7 continuous vulnerability assessment of your environment and utilises AI to generate possible paths based on vulnerabilities & services from device, allowing users to rank which devices should be patched first based on severity of the device. It also provides an immediate solution if a patch is unavailable, allowing vulnerable devices to continue being used.

  • SEAL (Self-Evolving Adaptive Learning) offers Adaptive Learning as a Service (ALaaS) for personalised learning automation. We provide a complete set of APIs and development tools to support the adaptive learning backend for learning management systems.

  • AirQ platform is an innovative, cost-effective solution for air quality and environmental monitoring. The AirQ device is small, portable and low-cost. It provides real-time and location-specific air quality and environmental data via the AirQ Dashboard and Smartphone App.

    Advanced data analytics techniques have been developed for data calibration and data-driven services. The AirQ solution can be used for schools and childcare centres, facilities management, intelligent lampposts, smart buildings, and other use cases.

Humanities &
Social Sciences

  • DISC is an elderly-friendly dual-language cognitive intervention program that leverage multi-modal touch screen technology to delay the onset of and slow down the cognitive decline in seniors. The grand vision of the intervention is to deliver a simple and user-friendly intervention tool that can eventually be broadly installed and utilized throughout Singapore elderly care settings to provide cognitive stimulations and to help alleviate caregiver’s burden.

Robotics

  • Snap Robotics develops advanced multimodal soft end-effectors and grippers with broad grasping capabilities. Our designs can be tailored for various applications to enable the automation of challenging manipulation tasks without the need for specialized setups. With our multimodal capabilities, our systems can replace complex setups and eliminate tooling changeups.​

  • airXeed aims to use their novel aerial payload deployment technology for environmental efforts such as digital transformation of the forests and upper atmospheric monitoring. The team creates nature-inspired deployment platforms that are low-cost, scalable, and can be deployed in inaccessible places, while being easily adaptable for various applications.

  • At Spinoff Robotics, we aim to optimize industrial operations through research-grade autonomous aerial robotics solutions. We specialize in configurable tethered aerial robots for more efficient high-altitude inspection and cleaning operations. Our unique tethered solution offerings allow hours of extended flight operation, fluid ejection, and a dedicated datalink for real-time defect detection and mapping. Combined with advanced autonomy, we are positioned to help enterprises automate repetitive manual processes across varied GPS-denied environments.

  • A multi-robot system for cleaning solar arrays that uses a primary tethered drone and a secondary tethered companion robot to wash and brush the panel surfaces. The system will automate solar array cleaning, providing a cost-effective and scalable solution for solar panel owners looking to improve the efficiency and sustainability of their installations.

FAQs

  • Startups should not have a proposed business idea that falls under the list provided below

    • Cafes, restaurants, night clubs, lounges, bars, foot reflexology, massage parlours, gambling, prostitution, social escort services, employment agencies (including recruiting foreign work permit holders and workers/support staff, relocation services, and manpower services), and geomancy.

  • We are actively looking out for new solutions and research to be commercialised! Do share with us your idea at entrepreneurship@sutd.edu.sg and we can advise you further.

  • We are an Accredited Mentor Partner of Enterprise SG, and we welcome you to apply for the Startup SG Founders Grant with us, subject to meeting the eligibility criteria. If you are interested to apply for our other grants, please contact us at entrepreneurship@sutd.edu.sg.

  • We administer a range of grants which cater to both incorporated and non-incorporated start-ups. Please contact us at entrepreneurship@sutd.edu.sg to find out if you are eligible.

  • We administer a range of grants which can also apply to teams that have received prior grants. Please contact us at entrepreneurship@sutd.edu.sg to find out if you are eligible.

  • Our grant projects are generally industry agnostic. Most of them are technology-based, knowledge-based or innovation-based.

  • We support aspiring founders with a range of incubation support from mentors, industry experts, dedicated venture partners, networking opportunities and introductions to potential investors.

  • No two ideas are the same. Progress milestones and outcomes are tailored for each project. We have seen the most success with teams that had successfully developed a proof-of-concept or working prototype coupled with a validated business model.

  • Yes, grants are subject to funding guidelines set by respective grant agencies and benefactors to ensure that they are properly utilised. Please contact us at entrepreneurship@sutd.edu.sg to find out about what is fundable and what is not.