Singtel Future Makers

Singtel Future Makers

 

At Singtel, our purpose is to empower people and businesses and create a more sustainable future

We recognised that technology and digitisation have a critical role to play in enabling positive social impact and empowering the vulnerable in our community. However social impact start-ups with digital innovations faced significant challenges in scaling their product.

Through Singtel Future Makers, our social innovation programme, we want to help start-ups in the social and environmental sector make a difference with their solutions.

Given our ICT capability and product technology, Singtel is well placed to build capacity, partnerships and scale social impact start-ups. We also work with partners to catalyse go-to-market local and regional opportunities and build a social innovation ecosystem to accelerate the start-ups' growth.

"We believe in addressing social, community and environmental causes in the markets where we operate. One way in which we do this is to drive social innovation through Singtel Future Makers. Since no person or organisation can go it alone in sustainability efforts, we hope to spur start-ups which share our vision by providing support for them through capacity building and mentorship workshops and connecting them with our ecosystem of partners."

Andrew Buay,
Vice President, Group
Sustainability, Singtel

Going Regional

Since the launch in Singapore in 2016, Singtel Future Makers has gone regional to Australia, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand. Our subsidiaries Optus and associates TelkomselGlobeAIS, Airtel  joined the movement with their very own local accelerator programmes, supporting local entrepreneurs as they leverage technology to address unique social challenges in their own communities.

To date, we have invested more than $5 million in the local and regional SFM programmes and supported 85 local and regional social impact start-ups. Check out their inspiring stories here.

Leaders from Singtel Group of companies including Andrew Buay (1st from left), Singtel’s Vice President of Group Sustainability, sharing mentoring start-ups in the 2023 Singtel Group Future Makers cohort.

 

Singtel Group Future Makers 2023

The Singtel Group Future Makers (SGFM) 2023 programme brought together nine alumni social impact start-ups from across the region to maximise the use of 5G, AI and IoT to scale their solutions regionally in areas such as digital healthcare, waste management, green technology, sustainable transport, well-being and inclusion.

The programme culminated in the SGFM Demo Day on 3 Nov 2023 in Singapore, where the start-ups pitched their technological solutions to our panel of judges from across the Singtel Group of companies (AIS, Airtel, Globe, Optus, Singtel, Telkomsel) as well as to an external audience which included investors, corporate and government partners.

The top awards, Platinum and Gold which includes $40,000 and $30,000 in grants, went to Virtual Psychologist (text-based counselling service integrated with wearable tech) and GEPP (waste management platform) respectively. Silver awards of S$25,000 each went to SoundEye (fall detection/ prevention in elderly) and Tictag (inclusive data annotation app). Bronze awards of S$15,000 each went to Aqilliz (Privacy compliant use of data for consumer insights through blockchain) and MyEco (electricity saving smart home solution using AI).  Additionally, Charopy (smart recycling bin solution) was granted S$10,000 to explore piloting their solutions for deployment in Singtel premises. In addition to the grants, all start-ups will receive support from the Group in the form of mentorship and access to a customer base of over 770 million mobile users to undertake business development regionally.

Finalists of the Singtel Group Future Makers 2023 programme

 

We are always on the lookout for the next Future Maker. Reach out to us at sustainability@singtel.com if you are keen to find out more!