Here are some of our entrepreneurs who've already set their gears in motion even before they're out of school! They have proven that they do not hesitate in the face of uncertainty even though entrepreneurship comes with many challenges. Find out more about our start-ups (Cudy, Kpop Kart, Munch, and BOW), who have been featured in the media recently.

Cudy

Alexander and Sean are undergraduates at Singapore Management University (SMU), but they’re also running a startup to help young Singaporeans improve their studies at the same time.

Almost every parent in Singapore sends their children to tuition—that’s nothing new.

But they noticed that not all families can afford the rising fees from tuition centres, which contributes to unequal learning opportunities for students from different economic backgrounds.

At the moment, Alexander has taken a pause on his own studies to focus on their online tuition platform Cudy, where they hope to “democratise education”.

The pair has hired over 500 freelance tutors (and counting) to livestream tuition classes online, and recently raised funding to upgrade their services.

Munch

“What to eat ah?” is an oft-repeated question that Singaporeans exchange with one another.

SMU undergrads Earnest and Fuxing, both 24-years-old, decided to develop an app that uses artificial intelligence to solve this quintessential Singaporean problem.

They launched Munch in January this year, a platform that learns users’ personal preferences and delivers weekly curations of food suggestions made just for them.

To them, being in school while they started up wasn’t a bad thing. 

In fact, it helped them out greatly as they managed to get a $10,000 grant and receive guidance to build Munch under SMU’s incubator programme.

BOW

Mandy was only 19 when she took a gap year after Junior College to create BOW, her own line of functional travel bags together with co-founder CK Koh.

Back in 2017, she shared how they survived an extremely tumultuous 12 months of R&D, disappointing trips to factories, drying up their savings, receiving negative feedback, and nearly throwing in the towel.

At the end of it, their efforts paid off in an extraordinary turn of events when their first product, Quiver, was fully funded on Kickstarter within just 3 days.

With her gap year fulfilled, Mandy enrolled into SMU, where she’s currently studying while she continues to manage BOW.

Kpop Kart

The Korean wave has hit global fans hard. While there are vast communities who spend lots of time and energy adoring their favourite idols, these three SMU students went further and turned their passion for K-pop into a business.

Founders of KpopKart Vera, Janessa and Moh Moh joined a hackathon in 2018, where they pitched their idea for a K-pop marketplace.

Back then, they got slammed down by judges who didn’t believe it was something needed.

But being in the scene themselves, they knew its problems, like the lack of regulation and the common scam risks that people encounter when buying fan-made merchandise.

As they built up credibility, they later won the grand prize at UNICON’s 2019 hackathon, and now sell products to over 20 countries.

Press release first released on Vulcan Post on 20 June 2019.