Ask a deeptech founder in Southeast Asia what keeps them up at night and few will blame the science. The harder problem is finding someone willing to let an unproven technology loose on a real building, a real plantation or a real data centre and then pay for it.
That is the gap Singapore Management University (SMU) is now selling its flagship competition on. The 13th Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition (LKYGBPC), run by SMU’s Institute of Innovation & Entrepreneurship (IIE), opened applications on Wednesday for university founders and recent graduates working on urban and sustainability problems.
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Fifty finalists will be flown to Singapore from 28 September to 1 October 2027 to compete for more than SGD2.5 million (US$2 million) in prizes. That pot is roughly where it stood for the 12th edition’s US$2M grand finals. What has changed is the story around it.
From trophy to pipeline
The organisers now frame the contest less as a podium and more as a front door. Selected finalists can move into SMU’s Urban SustaInnovator (USI) accelerator, launched in 2025, which promises market access, pilot projects and introductions across Asia. Behind that sits the US$10 million USI Fund SMU IIE launched in May to back ventures as they pilot and scale.
“Founders of breakthrough technologies can create value only when they reach the people, industries and communities they are designed to serve,” said Rony Palathinkal, who heads both LKYGBPC and USI at SMU IIE.
The competition covers 12 focus areas, from climate-tech, energy and urban mobility to food and land use, longevity and healthtech, and sustainable materials and circularity. It is open to startups with at least one founder still enrolled at university or within five years of graduating.
US$10 million is a modest cheque by venture standards, likely enough for a handful of seed-stage bets. But the fund signals an important admission: a pitch trophy, on its own, rarely moves a deeptech company forward.
What the alumni actually got
SMU’s evidence comes from three 12th-edition finalists, and it is worth reading closely.
Malaysian agritech Qarbotech turns agricultural waste into compounds that lift crop productivity — the kind of farm-waste play some think could mint the region’s next climate unicorn. It is no stranger to pitch stages, having also taken top honours at Tokyo’s SusHi Tech 2026 contest.
Co-founder Chor Chee Hoe credits the LKYGBPC and USI network with meetings with family offices that led to several pilots. “Right now, we are halfway through a 12-month pilot with a large sugar cane plantation in the Philippines and we’re launching in another Southeast Asian market,” he said. An SMU connection also found Qarbotech a distributor for Thailand and Pakistan.
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Singapore’s Standard Physics, formerly Inviscid AI, combines real-time IoT sensor data with computational fluid dynamics (the physics of how air and heat move) to build digital twins that help buildings and data centres cut energy use. Founded by Qiu Ziming and Kabir Jain, it has secured a pilot with The GEAR, the Singapore innovation hub of Japanese construction giant Kajima, and is discussing three more. It recently raised a US$2.3 million seed round led by Square Peg Capital.
“YC was good at getting us from zero to one, and then USI has been very helpful in getting us from one to 10,” Jain said, referring to the startup’s stint in Y Combinator’s Winter 2026 cohort.
The third, Cambridge-based Mimicrete, founded in 2021 by Dr Liz Zijing Li, is developing “self-healing” concrete that seals its own cracks, extending infrastructure lifespan and cutting maintenance and carbon. It is validating the material at The GEAR, joining a growing list of startups such as Neocrete betting on low-carbon concrete.
These are encouraging stories, but they are pilot stories. A 12-month trial is a hypothesis, not recurring revenue, and Southeast Asian corporates are far better at starting trials than signing purchase orders, a problem e27 has tracked in the “frozen middle” where 57 per cent of firms cannot scale their AI pilots. Attribution is murky too: Standard Physics had Y Combinator in its corner before USI.
Singapore’s sandbox sales pitch
The timing leans on Singapore’s ambition to be the region’s test bed for sustainability tech. Its SGD37 billion (US$29 billion) Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) 2030 plan earmarks SGD10.8 billion (US$8.4 billion) for mission-oriented research, including urban solutions and sustainability. In February, two ministries added a SGD40 million (US$31 million) USS Translation Fund to help companies pilot and commercialise such solutions.
SMU’s pitch to founders is that it can carry them beyond the island. It runs overseas centres in Bangkok, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City and Shenzhen, and International Advisory Councils in eight countries. That network “enables us to forge connections that enable startups to cross borders,” said Professor Sun Sun Lim, SMU’s Vice President of Partnerships and Engagement.
The border-crossing is the real test. A sensor-laden pilot in a showcase Singapore building is a long way from a cash-strapped developer in Manila or a palm oil estate in Sumatra, where price tolerance is lower and procurement slower.
A crowded field for founders’ attention
LKYGBPC is not short of rivals. Accelerators such as Startupbootcamp now run dedicated sustainability cohorts in Singapore, Tokyo’s SusHi Tech hosts its own global pitch contest, and corporate innovation arms court foreign deeptech, as Deloitte’s recent demo day for Tokyo startups eyeing Southeast Asia showed. Closer to home, NUS and NTU run their own deeptech commercialisation programmes.
LKYGBPC’s edge is reach. Its 12th edition drew more than 1,500 deeptech entries from founders at 1,200 universities across 91 countries, including Stanford, Cambridge and the University of Tokyo, before ChemT and Polar Code took the top prizes. SMU says finalists from the 9th to 12th editions have collectively raised more than SGD1 billion (US$780 million).
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That figure deserves an asterisk. It is self-reported, cumulative across four editions and likely includes capital many of these teams would have raised anyway. Competitions are good at selecting winners; proving they made them is harder.
Shirley Wong, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at SMU IIE, Managing Partner of TNF Ventures and chair of the 13th edition’s advisory committee, frames urbanising Asia as both problem and opportunity. Applications close on 31 March 2027.
The more telling scorecard, though, will arrive before next year’s winners are crowned: how many of the last cohort’s pilots have turned into paying contracts.
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