There was no funding announcement. No government mandate. No corporate strategy deck. Just borrowed rooms, called in favours, and a recurring observation that Singapore’s AI builders had nowhere to collide.
That was the origin of 65labs, now Singapore’s largest grassroots AI builder community with more than 5,000 members. Since its founding, the community has outgrown every venue it has ever been given. This reveals that the demand for such a platform had always been there; what was missing was the occasion.
“The gap was infrastructure,” says Sherry Jiang, co-founder of 65labs and CEO of AI finance startup Peek, in an email interview with e27. “The invisible machinery that Silicon Valley has built over decades — the third spaces, the casual collisions, the culture of showing up for each other without an agenda. Singapore didn’t have enough of it. So we started building some.”
What makes 65labs genuinely unusual is who is running it. Every co-founder holds a full-time role elsewhere. The community is built in the margins: between jobs, on weekends, after hours.
Interestingly, this is not seen as a limitation. Instead, Jiang argues that it is the point.
“Grassroots means you don’t wait for permission,” Jiang says. “No one handed us a mandate or a curriculum. We saw a gap and started filling it.”
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In practice, that philosophy shapes everything about how 65labs operates. There are no certifications, no headcounts reported upward, and no KPIs tied to a government grant. The community programmes from the bottom up, watching what questions its members are actually asking, which problems they are stuck on, and building events around that signal.
The people who turn up reflect that approach. Agrim Singh, a co-founder of the 65Labs community who is also the CTO and co-founder of Niyam AI, describes the range as genuinely surprising: NUS and NTU students at their first technical event sitting next to engineers with three decades of experience; a father who arrived at a 24-hour hackathon with his two teenage children and competed alongside seasoned founders; mid-career professionals from finance, law, and healthcare using 65labs as an on-ramp for reorienting their careers around AI.
“What they have in common is that they’re not here to talk about AI,” Singh says. “They’re here to build with it.”
No panels, no speculation
65labs made a deliberate early decision about which events it would and would not run. No panels where people speculate about AI’s future or keynotes from people who are not close to the work. If you take the stage at a 65labs event, you are showing something you actually built: what worked, what broke, what you would do differently.
“That standard filters the room naturally,” Singh says. “People who come to be seen at an AI event stop coming after the first one. People who come to learn and build keep coming back.”
The results of that filter have been visible enough to attract serious outside attention. OpenAI chose 65labs to run its first official Codex hackathon in Singapore. Cursor held its first Singapore event through the community. And now, 65labs is hosting AI Engineer World’s Fair — the world’s leading conference for AI engineers, backed by OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Cursor, Vercel and Z.ai — when it makes its first-ever Asia stop in Singapore from May 15 to 17.
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Singapore’s unique position
Jiang draws a sharp distinction between what 65labs is building and what top-down initiatives can offer. She invokes an unlikely historical parallel: the Homebrew Computer Club, the garage gathering founded in 1975, where a then-unknown engineer named Steve Wozniak first showed up and went home to begin designing what became the Apple I. The club never had more than a few hundred members, but its cultural legacy is incalculable.
“That’s what grassroots actually means,” she says. “The room exists because we built it. Everyone in it chose to be there.”
Singapore’s geographic and political position, she argues, makes 65labs something more than a local success story. Unlike San Francisco, which she describes as a cultural silo that exports ideas more readily than it imports them, Singapore is structurally wired to look both ways: East and West, emerging markets and developed markets, consumer and enterprise.
“The builders here are naturally exposed to product principles and engineering approaches that have worked across wildly different contexts,” she says. “Western companies are starting to recognise this. They’re not just coming to broadcast. They genuinely want to understand how different markets are solving problems they haven’t cracked yet. That curiosity is new.”
As 65labs scales, its co-founders are clear-eyed about the risks. Singh names integrity as the hardest thing to preserve, the slow erosion that comes from individually defensible decisions that accumulate into something unrecognisable.
“Every community that has lost its culture has lost it the same way,” he says. “We think about that a lot.”
The marker of success they keep returning to is deceptively simple: are the people who showed up before anyone was watching still in the room?
For now, they are. And the room, as ever, is full.
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Image Credit: Nicholas Cheng (VideoPulse.io)
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