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Each one of you can meet 1 founder.

Each founder will welcome maximum 9 students.

As a team, try to meet as many founders as possible. Decide who will meet which founder.

1. Explore the founders’ organizations

2. Write down your name with the Founder you wish to meet

3. Prepare questions for your meeting. You may use this padlet to suggest questions

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An educational platform that uses eye-catching artworks and illustrations to create engaging learning materials for children. We take important social topics that should be part of the school curriculum (but aren't necessarily) and engage children in a visual conversation, nurturing creativity and social emotional development.

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Creators of the World's First Robotic Cafe and Lounge | Ratio

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CREATORS OF THE WORLD'S FIRST ROBOTIC CAFE & LOUNGE

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During the COVID-19 crisis we carefully reimagined and retooled our design workshops for a truly engaging and effective online experience.

WE'VE TAKEN A PAGE FROM OUR OWN BOOK AND GIVEN OUR WORK A PANDEMIC EXPERIENCE MAKEOVER.

We know that a Virtual Workshop is not a straightforward migration of an in-person, on-premise workshop to online.

Our workshop designs, guidelines and ways of working anticipate and adapt to the limitations (and advantages) of the virtual space, combining this with a deeper-than-usual understanding of participant dynamics.

We make sure that workshop experiences provide frictionless use of tech tools, time management that is both disciplined and flexible and incorporates beyond-the-workshop consultations to provide guidance, drive engagement and keep the conversations going.

HIGHLY ENGAGING, INCLUSIVE, INTENTIONAL AND GOAL-GUIDED. THAT'S THE KINDMIND PHILOSOPHY TO REMOTE WORK.

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During the COVID-19 crisis we carefully reimagined and retooled our design workshops for a truly engaging and effective online experience. We know that a Virtual Workshop is not a straightforward migration of an in-person, on-premise workshop to online.

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Tsaa Laya rediscovers the herbal traditions of the Philippines into an exquisite tea experience. As the Philippines' premium tea brand, Tsaa Laya explores and promotes the local herbs, fruits and spices from the Philippines islands into modern tea ingredients.

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Akadasia is a Singapore based mission driven education technology business that aims to Empower Educators Everywhere.

We do this through FREEJOO, the largest online community of educators in Asia.

By subscribing to FREEJOO skillED, educators get access to several continuing professional development (CPD) courses so that you can up-skill and re-skill yourself with a variety of new pedagogical and technical skills needed to teach the Gen-Z learner at your own time and own pace.

In addition to this, you learn by doing through FREEJOO designED, a lesson authoring platform (just like Canva, but for education) that will empower you to build engaging lessons for your learners - quickly, easily and most importantly, in the language of your choice. These lessons can then be exported to any SCORM compliant learning management system making our solution tech agnostic and giving you the flexibility on how you want to distribute your courses to your learners.

Finally, by providing you with anytime access to our courses and technology we empower and support you in your own journey as lifelong learners.
Get Access To Our CPD Programs Now

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Akadasia is a Singapore based mission driven education technology business that aims to Empower Educators Everywhere. We do this through FREEJOO, the largest online community of educators in Asia.

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Design for Change, Singapore - Design for Change Singapore is a social enterprise, and the Singapore exclusive partner of Design for Change Global

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'A ONEderful World by Design' was our first ever virtual Global 'Be the Change' celebration. This festival of change makers from around the world was hosted by DFC Singapore on the 20th November 2020, UN World Children's Day. The event was a global celebration of children from around the world, sharing real change stories and how their actions create real impact.

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=CLASS
RURAL SCHOOL

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1. What inspires you to start this?
2. What is the greatest challenge when started out this business?
3. Is Eyeyah the initial idea/solution right from the start? If no, how did it evolve?
4. How did you ensure that it is a solution that will always in demand?
5. What lessons did you learn from Kult did you apply to EYEYAH?
6. How important is it to have the right business partner?
7. Who were the first few people you wanted to buy into the idea of EYEYAH?
8. Was there a time where you felt like EYEYAH might not have worked — what did you have to tell yourself to push forward?
9. Would you ever consider broadening your target audience for EYEYAH — for instance to the elderly? Why or why not?
10. Does EYEYAH have plans to eventually become more inclusive for visually impaired children or students as well?
11. What is the greatest impact that you want to see in this business?
12. How did you do the fund raising? Please share some experience.

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1) What was your initial vision, and why?
2) Best failures in terms of the learnings you got?
3) Why did you choose those 4 services?
4) What does the future look like for KindMind?
5) What was the founding team dynamic like?
6) Do you see the future of work (10 years down the line) being purely digital or an equal hybrid of digital/physical?
7) How did you raise money at the start?
8) How long did it take you to raise enough money to get started?
9) How long were you into the project before starting to get a salary?
10) Were there any specific challenges/opportunities in starting your business where you did?
11) How did you ensure that top management stayed aligned at the start?

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1) What inspires you to start this?
2) What was your biggest frustration when starting this business?
3) Is Akadasia originally intended to serve Educators? If no, how much has Akadasia pivoted from the original idea you had ?
4) Did you start off with a single geographical location or multiple locations? What were your considerations back then?
5) Will your platform be inaccessible with a low internet connectivity environment?
6) How do you monetize your platform? How do you determine the pricing mechanism for your platform?
7) How do you reach out your service to the educators?
8) There are quite a few LMS platforms already, for eg. Edomodo, Schoology, what makes Freejoo platform stands out?
9) Is there a feedback mechanism to ensure that the quality of teaching is actually improving through the training?
10) What has been the experiences of those who used Freejo like? What were their transformation story?
11) non academia educators like art, music, martial arts teachers) could also up-skill? Their teaching usually require a much personalised mentorship.

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RURAL SCHOOL
SMARTY PANTS

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SMARTY PANTS
'CHER

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'CHER
KINDR

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KINDR
LISTN

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LISTN (Jon Jon)
=CLASS (Gita, Jas)

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1) Why did you choose to focus on drink and food?
2) What did your first MVP from this look like?
3) What was your biggest failure and what was the best learning you got from this experience?
4) How has the response to Ratio been like?
5) What are the future plans for Ratio?
6) Who did you initially market Ratio to and what lessons did you learn from that?
7) Is there a reason why you opened Ratio Robotics Cafe and Lounge in China first?
8) What was your pitch to the investors? What is their profile? Why do you think that they invested in the cafe?
9) Is the Human interaction being replaced in the process?

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Robotics cafe and lounge startup Ratio has just completed raising US$10 million in its series A round, which was led by Singapore-based property giant Frasers Property, Tech in Asia has learned.

Others that joined the round include JustCo, the Southeast Asian co-working unicorn, and zVentures, the venture arm of gaming and lifestyle brand Razer.

The money was invested through Ross Digital, Ratio's parent company. Till date, the Singapore and Shanghai-based firm has raised a total of US$12 million.

Launched in 2017, Ratio is a cafe and lounge that uses robotic technology to create coffee drinks and other beverages for customers. Orders can be placed through the cloud, and the robotic arms are said to serve close to 60 types of coffee and cocktail drinks.

Currently, Ratio has a total of eight robotics cafes and lounges: five in China and three in Singapore.

The round was oversubscribed, so the company is considering a series A+ round in the second half of 2021, Ratio CEO and founder, Gavin Pathross, who also serves as chief executive of Ross Digital, tells Tech in Asia.

The new funds will support Ross Digital's plan to expand in Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia this year and to roll out its robotic arm units to customers. The company is also looking to boost its engineering and IT teams in Singapore and Shanghai "by another 20 people in the next 12 months," said Pathross.

Besides this, Ratio will be investing heavily in research and development to reduce the manufacturing costs of its robots, making them cheaper for customers.

Pathross further said that by the end of 2021, the company aims to produce 40 robotic arms, which will include units to food and beverage (F&B) customers as well as their own cafes.

Ratio's clients either franchise its cafe and lounge or lease its technology for their own F&B businesses. Customers can rent the robotic arm units for between US$2,000 to US$4,000 a month, depending on the configuration.

At present, the robotic arms are configured to create drinks from Nanyang kopi, which is popular in the Southeast Asian market, to Western-style coffees and cocktails.

Ross Digital is now in the R&D stage of building new robots for non-beverage categories like food.

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Robotics cafe startup Ratio nets $10m in series A round led by Frasers Property

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Robotics cafe and lounge startup Ratio has just completed raising US$10 million in its series A round, which was led by Singapore-based property giant Frasers Property, Tech in Asia has learned. Others that joined the round include JustCo, the Southeast Asian co-working unicorn, and zVentures, the venture arm of gaming and lifestyle brand Razer.

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KINDR
Why did you pick tea?
What's different about starting a social enterprise? Was it what you expected?
How did you make your first sale?
What was the toughest part of your first year in business?
What's your team dynamic like / or was?
Where do you want to take the business now?
When you first started what was your vision? Has that changed, why?
What surprised you the most through this experience?

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1) What are your key insights for scaling up your Sollution?
2) How do you monetize this? WHEN exactly do you ask for funding?
3) How do you recognise the tipping point?  What/ When is too fast and too slow?
4) what are the watch-outs?
5) In your perspective would these type of learning work across all cultures?
6) When you where testing this what was your biggest failure and what did you learn from it?
7) Who is your biggest stakeholder eg who do you need to convince to get this implemented in the school curriculum..
8) What are your future plans for this?
9) When do you know that DFC Singapore has succeeded? Is it based on outreach or impact, i.e. proposed solution by students gets picked up for development?
10) Singapore dabbled in DT in the past and it did not gain enough traction then. It has seen a resurgence now but what were your “riskiest assumptions” when starting DFC Singapore?

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Some studies shows that human inclined to treat humanoid robot as living beings. Do you think that if you were using a robot able to speak the customers would react differently? Would that be better for business? Did you test that?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/08/13/please-do-not-switch-me-off-an-experiment-with-begging-robot-shows-people-hesitate-pull-plug/

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Can you share the experiments that you did to validate your idea?

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1. There are no competitors, just potential collaborators.
2. Failure doesn't exist in her  vocabulary — just small wins.
3. She started the business  accidentally and calls herself an accidental entrepreneur.
4. Managing teams is a constant struggle.
5. Trust in your team members, knowing their strengths/weaknesses and what they can contribute is important.
6. It's necessary to find the cookie monsters who would pay, but they might not be the people who you would directly impact.

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Trust your gut
have an exit strategy like a pre-nup
You don't have to exit your full-time job to be an entrepreneur..

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Personally: Mental Health of the founder in the face of uncertainty. You need to create support systems for yourself in a state of uncertainty. Find your own peach and your own hope, through all the adversity. This was about creativity for me: Finding joy was what it was about in the beginning.

The person that loves it the most, the visionary, will carry the biggest burden. Don't compare, the ideas usually come from one person and your team plays a supporting role, that's ok.

Scaling up social enterprises is to educate and teach community partners. Look for investors to fund and distribute community partners.

Its always a calculated risk, what I want is to manage burnout. When I had to quit my job and transition that was the big moment.

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1// Fear of sharing IPs and being copied and not having control -
"Keep innovating and that fear will go away because competitors will be busy copying you and not innovating." <-- EPIC 'you do you moment' IMHO

2// Remember the WHY/ the PURPOSE you're doing this and money will come.

3// REMAIN AUTHENTIC

4// TENACITY AND THE "I CAN" SPIRIT

5// BE 'Infectious'

6// social aspect and money aspect - twins with diff personalities

7// risk of scaling up

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Replicate according to the market need - ask your customer.

Startup culture needs a lot of nurturing.

Gap between digital skills - meeting the middle ground of teachers who are not digitally savy and Gen Z who are savy.