What does it take to turn university research into a globally competitive startup? And what can Europe and Asia learn from each other when it comes to innovation, investment and emerging technologies?
These questions shaped our visit to Singapore’s A5X conference, where EU-Startups was invited by NUSX, the National University of Singapore’s innovation and enterprise arm, to interview founders, investors and academics about the future of DeepTech.
Across six conversations, alongside interviews with the winners of the Singapore Defense Tech Hackathon, a common theme emerged: scientific breakthroughs alone are not enough. Building successful technology companies requires capital, infrastructure, international collaboration and, crucially, a clearer path from laboratory research to commercial applications.
Click here to watch our onsite interviews.
Beyond the lab
One of A5X’s major developments was the evolution of NUS Enterprise into NUSX, accompanied by ambitions to generate US$1 billion in financial returns and develop technologies capable of positively impacting one billion people by 2035.
For Dr. Tan Sian Wee, Senior Vice President of Innovation and Enterprise at NUS, achieving these goals requires rethinking the earliest stages of venture creation.
Rather than simply investing in existing startups, NUSX wants to identify commercially promising research, validate its market potential and help assemble the teams needed to transform discoveries into businesses.
As Dr. Tan explained: “So it’s really a talent pipeline, a technology pipeline, a capital pipeline and then an impact pipeline. That’s what we’re thinking about step by step by step. So on the talent portion of things, we’ve been operating the National University of Singapore’s overseas colleges programme for over 20 years now. It started with Silicon Valley and we’ve built other locations around the world.”
An important part of this strategy is Nova, NUSX’s newly announced AI platform, designed to analyse university research and identify potential commercial applications, licensing opportunities and industry partnerships.
Professor Benjamin Tee, Vice President of Ecosystem Building at NUSX, reinforced this emphasis on commercialisation. A serial entrepreneur and researcher, Tee discussed the challenges of translating academic discoveries into products, particularly in fields requiring expensive infrastructure and lengthy development cycles.
For Tee, research institutions must increasingly consider the practical outcomes of their work. As he noted: “What is happening today is that there’s a massive change in how we think about research and its impact. Many agencies today are looking at impact both commercially as well as social. The way to bring impact to people is really to take the next step. Going out of your lab, talking to potential people, potential users, and seeing how your technology can fit into their workflow, into their lives.”
Bridging two worlds
International collaboration was another major talking point, particularly following the announcement of a partnership between NUSX and Munich-based UnternehmerTUM.
Professor Helmut Schönenberger, co-founder and CEO of UnternehmerTUM, explained how the organisation has developed a venture-building ecosystem connecting education, research, prototyping, investment and industrial partnerships.
However, he argued that even well-developed local ecosystems cannot provide everything a globally ambitious startup needs.
As Schönenberger put it: “I think every ecosystem has its strengths and then the question is, as an entrepreneur, ‘where do I need a base to really bring the company to the next phase?’ […] If you really want to build a global company today you have to leverage many ecosystems.”
Munich offers access to established industrial networks, engineering expertise and European customers. Singapore, meanwhile, provides connections to Asian markets, research talent and substantial investment resources.
The partnership aims to connect these complementary strengths through international venture-building activities, investment relationships and talent exchanges.
Both Schönenberger and Dr. Tan emphasised that these connections must begin well before startups are ready to expand internationally.
AI’s reality check
Artificial intelligence featured prominently throughout A5X, but the conversations also revealed a distinction between AI’s technological possibilities and the infrastructure required to deliver them.
Dr Orna Berry, Technical Director at Google Cloud and former Chief Scientist of Israel’s Ministry of Industry and Trade, brought decades of experience in entrepreneurship, technology policy and research to the discussion.
Her central message was that advances in AI depend heavily on reliable computing resources, connectivity and energy infrastructure.
As Berry observed: “Infrastructure is always a bottleneck […] I think a great example of building a fairly clean infrastructure is Finland and the Hamina data centres. The first generation was built with significant power based on wind, and the second generation is also built with the ability to distribute heat to to be used in the surrounding.”
Berry also challenged the idea that regulation and innovation are necessarily incompatible. While excessive restrictions can complicate entrepreneurship, technologies used in healthcare, finance and critical infrastructure require safeguards and accountability.
These questions became particularly tangible in our conversation with Dr Babak Parviz, Co-Founder and CEO of NewDays.ai, a Seattle-based startup founded in 2024 that uses AI to support people experiencing dementia and cognitive impairment.
Previously involved in developing Google Glass and leading initiatives at Amazon, Parviz is now applying his experience to a healthcare problem with personal significance.
NewDays combines generative AI with human clinical supervision to make personalised cognitive interventions more accessible. The technology can undertake repetitive elements of treatment while qualified clinicians remain responsible for patient care.
He also highlighted one advantage smaller startups have over technology giants: “I think for a younger company really it boils down to velocity of execution. So either a younger company can execute fast and that’s really what they have. If not they would definitely lose to the larger companies and this is our attempt to execute as fast as possible and be very focused also on one specific problem that we’re trying to solve.”
For NewDays, this means focusing on a specific clinical problem and developing a solution that larger, less specialised organisations might struggle to prioritise.
Defence meets DeepTech
The conference also explored the increasingly important intersection between venture creation and defence innovation.
Gary Ang, Professor of Practice in Defence Innovation and Applications at NUS and founder of the NUS Defence Tech Venture Lab, discussed the challenges of bringing defence technologies from early research into operational environments.
“So this mission that we have here is building building national resilience through defense entrepreneurship. […] So there are two ways to do it, and they complement each other. One is to have a hackathon, because in hackathon you get talent and you convert talent into startups.”
These themes were reflected in the Singapore Defense Tech Hackathon, which brought together teams to develop solutions addressing practical defence challenges.
We also spoke with Wayne Lin of NeuroMech, winner of the 48-hour challenge, whose team developed a brain-computer interface for controlling unmanned ground vehicles, and Vaikesh Manimaran of MAELSTROM, winner of the three-month challenge, whose team worked on a coordinated micro-missile system designed to counter hostile drone swarms.
Both projects illustrated the potential of combining emerging technologies with defence applications, while also raising questions about technical reliability, commercialisation and the role of human oversight in increasingly autonomous systems.
Final Thoughts
Across all these conversations, A5X revealed how closely connected the challenges facing Europe’s and Asia’s innovation ecosystems have become.
Universities need better ways to commercialise research, founders need access to international talent and customers, and investors must support technologies that often require years to reach market readiness.
The growing relationship between NUSX and European institutions such as UnternehmerTUM offers one possible response: building innovation ecosystems that collaborate internationally from the beginning, rather than waiting until startups are ready to expand.