One of Singapore’s oldest co-working spaces is evolving to stand out in a crowded market

Photo credit: Found

The Hub Singapore is one of the oldest co-working spaces in the city-state. It has been a fixture of the local startup ecosystem since 2012.

After six years as part of the global Impact Hub network, the company is venturing out on its own, shedding the Hub license and rebranding itself as Found. The new entity will continue to work with its current clients and boost its consultancy services aimed at entrepreneurs and corporates. It will also expand to new cities in Southeast Asia.

The Hub (and now Found) co-founder and CEO Grace Sai tells Tech in Asia the time is right for the business to grow beyond Singapore. It couldn’t do that within its existing license agreement with the Impact Hub network, as separate licenses would have to be negotiated for each new city.

The company had its most profitable year in 2017 despite increased competition, Sai claims. “I think our hypothesis to focus on the members and the value we bring to them has worked out way better than we thought. When the big players came, we thought we were going to lose members, and we lost no one.”

Helping corporates embrace innovation

To stay competitive, Found will focus on a range of services that the Hub has been steadily building over the last three years.

The company appoints account managers who work with “more than half” of its members to understand their needs. They help them determine their goals, runway, and hiring and funding requirements.

“We know all these things about each member we work with and then we become a broker, advisor, and facilitator,” Sai says. “So it’s way beyond selling a table and a chair.”

Found has also been coaching corporations on innovation and startup culture. In fact, 40 percent of its revenue comes from this work. Sai explains that her team has developed a proprietary method to instill startup thinking within big firms. It’s worked with 75 so far.

Among them is Singaporean banking giant DBS, which set up its first innovation team within The Hub, tapping the latter to form its initial strategy. The bank now has a full-blown innovation lab at Singapore’s One North tech district.

Found also worked with Procter & Gamble (P&G) when the multinational sought ideas to disrupt the laundry industry. The team helped P&G organize an innovation challenge where 14 finalists were chosen from the local entrepreneurship community. Out of those, 11 ideas were invited as pilots within P&G. Other clients include JP Morgan, Cartier, and Singapore’s NTUC.

The new company will retain the Hub Ventures Fund (now Found Ventures), an early-stage investment fund for Southeast Asia that it announced in 2015. The US$752,000 vehicle has poured seed funding into four startups so far, including property networkSoho and cybersecurity firm Horangi.

It’s way beyond selling a table and a chair.

From its Hub incarnation, Found inherits two locations in Singapore and is about to open one more, which will host a 50-50 mix of corporate clients and startups. Sai declined to share revenue details, saying only that the business is currently profitable and has seen a compound annual growth rate in revenue of 71 percent, from 2012 to 2017.

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