Business Mentors

Get to know the business mentors
supporting our founders here.

benny chan

Benny Chan

Head of Singapore Channels and Digitalisation
UOB

carine tan opptra

Carine Tan

Founder
Chain of Thought

Head of Brand - Fashion
Opptra

clarissa loh uobvm 1

Clarissa Loh Su Hui

Executive Director, Venture Management
UOB

hussein sulaiman

Hussein Sulaiman

Investment Principal
Jumpstart Disruptive Innovations
(JDI)

jo ng inspire marketing

Jo Ng

Founder and Director
Inspire Marketing

Co-Founder & Strategic Advisor
Advisors Collective

joewin tan 1

Joewin Tan

Founder
Quant Consulting Group

lesley ngai

Lesley Ngiam

Founder
Bit By Bit Marketing

lily wu canva

Lily Wu

Strategic GTM Lead (SEA)
Canva

mohan belani

Mohan Belani

Co-founder & CEO
e27

Partner
Orvel Ventures

moon yiu

Moon Yiu

Founder & CEO
DigitSense

Founder
Twixo

Patrick Ng Spark Launchpad 1

Patrick Ng

Innovation Director
Spark Launchpad

paulkan 400x400 1

Paul Kan

Country Head
SME Banking Singapore
(Emerging Enterprise)
UOB

sean tan kilsa

Sean Tan

Co-Founder & Senior Managing Partner
KILSA Global

vanessa ong

Vanessa Ong

Managing Director
Gernise Global Pte Ltd
Mamashop
Glyken

Carine Tan

Senior Brand Manager (SEA Brand Head - Fashion), Opptra
Founder, Chain of Thought

Carine Tan is a leadership and business strategist, and the founder of Chain of Thought, where she works closely with founders and leadership teams to build clarity, alignment, and sustainable growth strategies.

Prior to this, Carine spent over a decade working with leading multinational brands including Nike, adidas, Hasbro, and Sephora, where she drove brand strategy, category growth, and go‑to‑market execution across Asia Pacific. This experience continues to shape her practical, commercially grounded approach to growth.

Carine is known for helping leaders navigate complexity, sharpen decision‑making, and translate strategy into action. Her work focuses on strengthening both the strategic and human dimensions of leadership — supporting founders to step back from day‑to‑day operations and lead with greater clarity and intention.

Clarissa Loh

Executive Director, UOB Venture Management

Operational since 1992, UOB Venture Management (UOBVM) is the private equity/venture capital fund management arm of United Overseas Bank Limited, an Asian focused bank headquartered in Singapore. From its offices in Singapore, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City and Shanghai, UOBVM manages investment funds with a strong focus on responsible investing, integrating environmental, social and governance considerations into its investment process.

Clarissa’s professional career of more than 20 years combines both investment and operational finance experience. She is an experienced private equity investor and venture capitalist with an active role from deal sourcing and due diligence to deal execution. She plays a key role in driving UOBVM’s impact investments in South-East Asia and is involved in technology investments in the region. She also serves on the ESG Committee and oversees the strategy for UOBVM’s responsible investment approach and ESG initiatives.

Prior to joining UOBVM, she was with General Electric Company (“GE”) in its Financial Management Program. Whilst at GE, she worked with various GE business lines in Asia, in functional roles of project finance, business development, financial planning and analysis, with management award recognition.

Clarissa holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from National University of Singapore and is a CFA charter holder.

Hussein Sulaiman

Investment Principal, Ventures & Investments

With 11 + years of experience mentoring, building, and scaling tech startups across Southeast Asia, Mr. Hussein Sulaiman currently serves as the Investment Principal for JDI Group, where he is dedicated to empowering the region’s innovative entrepreneurs to thrive.

Previously, he was a pioneer team member of notable startups such as BeMyGuest, Lazada, and Zilingo, and spearheaded cross-border startup initiatives as Program Head of BLOCK71 Indonesia and Vietnam.

Joewin Tan

Chief Executive Officer, Quant Consulting Group and ACE.SG Women Entrepreneurship Committee (WEC) Member

Joewin Tan is an entrepreneur, speaker, and financial literacy advocate with over a decade of experience building multimillion-dollar ventures.

Known for her expertise on innovative financial strategies and turning failures into successes, she empowers SMEs to master business financial health through her unique ABC Methodology.

Drawing from her journey of overcoming personal and professional adversity, she inspires entrepreneurs and individuals to thrive in challenging times.

Passionate about resilience, she believes entrepreneurship is the ultimate school of life.

Lily Wu

Strategic GTM Lead, Canva

Lily Wu is Canva’s SEA Enterprise GTM Lead and first regional hire. She’s a serial “first-in-seat” operator, with experience ranging from North American agencies to VC partnerships at Stripe.

She also bootstrapped and sold a 7-figure education business, giving her both corporate GTM and entrepreneurial experience.

Mohan Belani

Co-founder & CEO, e27
Partner, Orvel Ventures

Mohan Belani is the co-founder and CEO of e27, a leading Southeast Asia platform that connects founders, investors, corporates, and governments to support business growth. Under his leadership, e27 has evolved into a key regional ecosystem player, known for its content, community, and flagship events such as Echelon.

With over a decade of experience, Mohan is an active investor, mentor, and strategic advisor. He has supported numerous founders and businesses across Southeast Asia, helping them navigate growth, scaling, partnerships, and market expansion.

Mohan began his entrepreneurial journey early, with formative experiences in Silicon Valley shaping his belief in the power of businesses to solve real-world problems at scale. In addition to e27, he is a partner at Orvel Ventures and is widely recognised for building strong networks and championing purpose-driven growth across the region.

Moon Yiu

Founder & CEO, DigitSense

Moon Yiu is a technology entrepreneur and global product leader with over a decade of experience driving digital transformation and AI innovation across industries including sustainability, education, retail, finance and biotechnology.

As the Founder & CEO of DigitSense, an AI transformation and product studio, Moon leads a team of seasoned technologists, transformation specialists, and AI engineers in building AgenticAI systems and enterprise digital solutions. Under her leadership, DigitSense has partnered with scale-ups and enterprises across North America, EMEA, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific to deliver high impact solutions that enhance decision-making and create new business models.

Prior to founding DigitSense, Moon worked across multiple cutting-edge technology sectors including extended reality, machine learning, IoT, and MedTech, gaining first-hand experience in how emerging technologies shift industries at scale.

Sean Tan

Co-Founder & Senior Managing Partner, KILSA Global

Born in 1977, Sean Tan is a business builder and market-expansion specialist with over 25 years of experience driving growth and helping companies enter and scale across new markets especially in ASEAN region. He spent the first twelve years of his career in software analytics and banking — an early pioneer in predictive analytics — holding global and regional management roles at SPSS (acquired by IBM), SAS and NEC. At Citibank and Standard Chartered Bank, he negotiated complex technology deals that delivered over USD100M in savings, honing the cross-border negotiation and stakeholder management skills that define his work today.

Since the end of 2011, Sean has focused on entrepreneurship. He founded Goodwater Company in Singapore, a social and environmental solution integrator, building and scaling a Centre of Excellence that aggregated a wide range of social innovations across multiple countries spanning Asia and EMEA — a cross-border platform uniting private, public and non-governmental partners to solve social and environmental challenges in developing markets.

Today, Sean is the co-founder, senior managing partner and shareholder of KILSA Global, a unique global business-building platform that accelerates business globalisation through a plug-and-play model — giving companies immediate access to KILSA’s pre-invested local teams, demand and ecosystems in each market. Working with both the Korean Government and directly with mature Korean SMEs — from Series A and above to publicly listed companies — to bring them into Singapore and the wider region, he has built KILSA’s footprint across Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines, taking a hands-on role in both advising and executing for clients across his core domains of social and environmental solutions, healthcare and wellness, renewable energy, sustainability, digital and future of mobility.

He also serves as a director of KILSA Global’s subsidiaries — KILSA Global Solutions, a bespoke system integrator, and KILSA Consultancy, a corporate secretarial firm — and, most recently appointed as a director of Autonomous2Global Innovations Pte Ltd, he has been instrumental in orchestrating the closure of a joint venture with a major conglomerate in the UAE.

Sean also serves as an advisor and commissioner to Indonesian entities, where he has mobilised and structured cross-border financing — including from state-owned enterprises and China’s Belt and Road consortium — to bring renewable-energy and hydropower projects to fruition. Across his career he has consistently opened new markets, forged cross-border partnerships and scaled ventures across Asia and the Middle East, and has helped several companies raise capital from venture capital firms and family offices. He occasionally speaks and trains at industry, university and entrepreneurship forums, and holds a BA (double major) in Marketing and International Business from the University of Tasmania. Guided by his Christian faith, Sean believes in stewarding KILSA’s business as God’s Business.