5 inspiring female entrepreneurs in Singapore

Dr Biz • September 16, 2020

Singapore is Asia’s most hospitable city for female entrepreneurs, ranking ahead of Hong Kong, Taipei and even Tokyo when it comes to its ability to attract and support high-potential business women. According to Dell’s 2019 Women Entrepreneur Cities Index, talent and technology are Singapore’s strongest pillars for women in business, with the city ranking 11th for talent and 6th in technology.

The vast pool of successful business women that Singapore has launched into the world is testament to the strength of its female talent pool. Indeed, last year the city moved up Dell’s rankings for talent thanks to increasing its top school rankings as well as its business school rankings, while also increasing the pool of professionals needed to help scale businesses. To celebrate Singapore’s female entrepreneurs, we have highlighted just a handful of the city’s most inspiring women.

Jenny Lee, managing partner at GGV Capital

The top name on Forbes’ current ‘Asia’s Power Business Women’ list, Jenny Lee is one of Singapore’s most famous female entrepreneurs. A former aviation engineer for Singapore’s ST Aerospace, Lee joined venture capital firm GGV in 2005 to open the company’s office in Shanghai. Since then, she has built up an investment portfolio that includes 11 ‘unicorns’ (unlisted companies valued at USD $1 billion) and one firm valued at a whopping $56 billion. In April last year she brought GGV back to Singapore, re-opening its office here, which had been closed since 2000. Lee has built up a reputation for spotting winners, with her investment in Chinese social media firm YY generating a 15x return. She told Forbes that, these days, she is focusing on ‘the sci-fi stuff’: companies in machine learning and robotics.

Rachel Lim, co-founder at Love, Bonito

Singaporean Rachel Lim makes a frequent appearance on Asia’s top women in business lists, and with good reason. Her fashion brand, Love, Bonito, is now one of the most successful to come out of SouthEast Asia for some time, with branches now spanning the region, from Singapore, to Hong Kong, to Jakarta to Ho Chi Minh City. Its success is built on an understanding of its market: Asian women looking for high quality, whimsical fashion in smaller sizes not catered for by international brands with products for bigger Western women. Born from a blog Lim and her friends started ten years ago, Love, Bonito has gone from an initial investment of just US $400 to raising USD $13 million in funding in 2018. A truly inspiring success story!

Jaelle Ang, co-founder and CEO, The Great Room

Professionally trained architect and former banker Jaelle Ang founded luxury coworking franchise The Great Room in 2016 with a vision to transform the workplace. Spotting a gap in the market for flexible office space that catered for higher-end corporates, Ang focuses on bringing 5 star luxury to the office. It’s a formula that works, with The Great Room opening its sixth location inside Singapore’s Raffles Hotel in August. Other locations include a 24,000-sq.ft. flagship site at Hong Kong’s One Taikoo Place, as well as spaces in Bangkok, where Ang also developed a sprawling complex for the Four Seasons group. Initially self-funding The Great Room, Ang is an example for ambitious female entrepreneurs, having now raised US $29 million from investors. As if that wasn’t enough, she’s also currently the youngest and only female board member of Thailand’s Country Group Development PCL.

Gillian Tan, founder of Clicknetwork and Monkey Superstar Pictures

Online TV pioneer Gillian Tan is well known for the company she founded in 2007, Clicknetwork, which was the first YouTube channel in Singapore to get 1 million subscribers. This is not least due to the channels’s controversial content, including its most famous video: “Xiaxue’s Guide to Life EP56 – Kissing a Girl”, which featured a same sex kiss. The video is no longer on the network as it was banned by the MDA (now the IMDA, or Infocomm Media Development Authority) who considered such content too risque for the internet. Today Clicknetwork viewers are more likely to find educational content on Tan’s channel, often produced with the help of the IMDA. The entrepreneur has also since founded reality and lifestyle TV production company Monkey Superstar Pictures, adding to the budding media mogul’s stable.

Hazel Kweh, Founder of BloomBack

Sometimes, life’s challenges throw-up opportunities. Such was the case for Hazel Kweh, who, having been raised in a single parent family with a disabled sibling, founded online flower company BloomBack to help those struggling to find economic opportunities, particularly low-income female entrepreneurs. A beneficiary of DBS’s Social Enterprise Support Programme, BloomBack provides skills training and employment to people in marginalised communities, helping them to find both emotional and financial stability. Kweh, formerly an executive at Prudential, founded BloomBack after attending a wedding with her sister, who was saddened to learn that the beautiful flowers at the event would go to waste at the end of the day. As such, one of BloomBack’s services includes ‘upcycling’ flowers from events into unique, preserved arrangements for homes and hospices, as well as its main range of stunning ‘everlasting’ floral products.

At Dr Biz, we provide tailored and comprehensive solutions for all entrepreneurs’ business needs. From incorporation to accountancy, tax and payroll, to professional advisory services, we help businesses in Singapore assess potential risks and become more cost effective and efficient.

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