Gen.T Leaders of Tomorrow 2026: meet the trailblazers shaping Singapore’s next decade

Aaron Tan started Carro in 2015 with Aditya Lesmana and Kelvin Chng, setting out to bring greater transparency to the used-car industry at a time when the process of buying and selling such vehicles was opaque, fragmented and largely offline. The unicorn company is now one of Southeast Asia’s largest automotive marketplaces, operating across seven markets, and utilising proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) tools that handle everything from vehicle inspections to pricing, financing and ownership transfers. As AI reshapes how companies hire, operate and create value, Tan, a 2020 Gen.T honouree, is applying the same rigour to Carro’s internal culture, including how he builds teams that can leverage the technology to be more effective. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in AI, exploring how the tech can help identify the traits that drive success.

Read more: They spotted this year’s Gen.T Leaders of Tomorrow. Here’s what they see

Dr Jaslyn Lee wants to solve two problems at once: food waste and the widespread use of harsh chemicals in antimicrobial products. At N&E Innovations, which she co-founded in 2020 with Didi Gan and where she was CTO, she developed a solution called ViKang, a patented antimicrobial formulation primarily derived from upcycled cashew nut waste that serves as a 100 per cent non-toxic, skin-safe alternative to harsh synthetic chemicals and alcohol. The company has sold more than 500,000 units of its consumer products and secured more than 20 clients across the retail, hospitality, aviation and medical industries, including Sheng Siong Group, Obtech Corporation and Qian Hu Fish Farm.

During her time as a researcher at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, she also helped develop a way to turn durian seeds into a food stabiliser and probiotics, and soya bean waste into a solution to grow yeast.

Ryan Ong launched Fogo Fungi as a bedroom experiment in early 2023 before scaling it into a viable indoor mushroom farm in January 2024—establishing it as one of the few vertically integrated ones in Singapore. He leverages proprietary substrate technology to upcycle food waste into premium gourmet mushrooms for restaurants and retail while closing the waste loop by composting spent substrate for agricultural reuse. In 2025, Fogo Fungi was awarded a 1.5-acre plot at Sungei Tengah by the Singapore Food Agency to boost production capacity. In the pipeline are mushroom supplements as well as plans to both expand its retail presence and double down on educating people through agritourism.

When Indra Kantono and Gan Guoyi, his wife and business partner, opened Jigger & Pony in 2012, Singapore’s cocktail culture was still finding its footing. Fourteen years on, the pair has built an empire—Jigger & Pony Group—that operates eight bars and restaurants across Singapore and Indonesia. Anchored by its namesake venue—which has been named The Best Bar in Singapore by Asia’s 50 Best Bars for six consecutive years while being a regular fixture in the global top 10 on The World’s 50 Best Bars list—the group opened its first overseas venture, Cosmo Pony, in Jakarta in 2024. This was followed by Japanese lifestyle bar Pop City x Pony in 2025 and the Korean cocktail-dining bar BOP (Bartenders of Pony) in 2026, both in Singapore. A 2017 Gen.T honouree, Kantono’s focus now extends to nurturing the next generation of hospitality leaders and bringing a distinctly Singaporean approach to new markets.

Read more: The Tatler Best-in-Class Bar Awards in Singapore for 2026

Mobashir Mohammad co-founded Ackcio, a deep-tech company building the wireless backbone for the world’s heaviest and most safety-critical industries. Frustrated that mines, dams and tunnels still ran on fragile cables and data that arrived too late, he set out in 2016 to make industrial monitoring wireless. Ackcio’s full-stack platform, from in-ground sensors to long-range Beam routers, now powers deployments in more than 55 countries across six continents, with landmark projects ranging from the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa to the Palace of Westminster in the UK.

When Dr Zhou Lihan co-founded Mirxes in 2014 as a spin-off from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star), his goal was to make early disease detection accessible. The company's flagship product, GASTROClear, is a groundbreaking microRNA blood test for the early detection of gastric cancer. In 2025, it became the first non-invasive blood test approved for gastric cancer screening in China—a market of more than 500 million eligible adults. That same year, Mirxes listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. A 2022 Gen.T honouree, Zhou’s next challenge is behavioural rather than technological: convincing individuals and healthcare systems alike to embrace preventive care before symptoms appear.

Read more: ‘If we can beat Covid, there’s no reason why we can’t beat cancer’: Mirxes’ Zhou Lihan on the science and tech behind saving lives

Yi Ng is reshaping how creative intellectual property (IP) is financed and scaled. Alongside British artist and designer Samuel Ross MBE, she scaled streetwear label A-Cold-Wall* to an annual revenue of more than €18 million. The pair then structured its majority sale, with the brand subsequently acquired by the UK’s Frasers Group. They went on to start SR_A in 2019, a design studio with an IP-first system, launching a joint venture with Inditex via Zara, and multi-year design partnerships with Apple via Beats, Hublot, Acqua di Parma and health-wearable company Whoop, where SR_A is also an investor.

The first Singaporean to claim an Open world title, Farhanna Farid made history at the 2022 World Open Classic Powerlifting Championships by shattering the Under-52kg deadlift world record twice in a single session to finish at 200.5kg. She has since rewritten the record books ten more times, with her latest feat being the phenomenal 217.5kg lift at the 2025 Asian Championships. A trained pharmacist who came into powerlifting by chance, Farhanna is now shaping the sport beyond competition, becoming Singapore’s first female IPF Category 1 referee—the sport’s highest international officiating qualification—in 2026. After years of competing almost non-stop, the 2023 Gen.T honouree is also focused on longevity: learning that progress sometimes means knowing when to slow down.

Read more: Farhanna Farid on smashing records and becoming Singapore’s ‘Frankenstein of powerlifting’

Hazlina Abdul Halim started her career in journalism, which inspired her to spend her next chapter building systems for those who need them the most—from establishing Singapore’s first secular halfway house for women, Rise Above, as president of the Singapore Muslim Women’s Association (PPIS) to leading pediatric wish-granting operations as CEO of Make-A-Wish Singapore. In 2026, she took the helm of the EtonHouse Community Fund, overseeing programmes from preschool through to higher education that create pathways for underserved children and families. On women’s development and leadership, the 2022 Gen.T honouree stresses that opportunities require “wiping sticky floors” and smashing ceilings—because addressing foundational barriers is the key first step.

Read more: Hazlina Abdul Halim on her work in social impact

Jeeta Bandopadhyay co-founded Tookitaki in 2014 with Abhishek Chatterjee on a counter-intuitive premise: that the best way to fight financial crime is to get financial institutions to collaborate. While criminals share tactics globally in real time, financial institutions have historically fought fraud in silos. Tookitaki’s Anti-Financial Crime (AFC) Ecosystem enables them to pool real-world crime intelligence collectively, making the network smarter with each new threat. Its artificial intelligence (AI) co-pilot, FinMate, reduces compliance investigation time by up to 70 per cent. In 2025, Tookitaki became the first regulatory technology company validated under Singapore's AI Verify initiative. The company today protects more than 500 million people across 11 countries, with recent expansions into Australia and New Zealand.

Andrea Baronchelli co-founded Aspire in 2018 with Giovanni Casinelli on the premise that businesses operating across borders deserve a single, integrated financial stack. Aspire now serves more than 50,000 companies across 30-plus markets and in 2025, secured eight licences and registrations across Australia, the EU and the US. The 2022 Gen.T honouree has said that if he were to start over, he would begin long-term planning earlier, as building regulated infrastructure across multiple markets takes years. His next stated goal: defining what he calls a new US$3 trillion category of intelligent financial operations for global start-ups.

Industrial manufacturing has long grappled with costly downtime and material waste. Together with co-founder Dr Sushant Garud, Suwira Teo built Aleph Technologies in 2023 to provide a physics- and chemistry-based artificial intelligence software that monitors live production environments, predicts operational deviations and optimises them before they become defects or waste. Clients include Pfizer, GSK, MSD and Syngenta, which have each seen estimated annual savings of between US$800,000 and US$1.1 million. Aleph Technologies now has deployments across Asia, the Middle East and Europe, and has plans to raise US$15 million in Series A funding by mid-2027.

Jeffrey Tiong, a 2018 Gen.T honouree, started Patsnap in 2007 on a S$55,000 student grant to make complex patent data accessible to anyone—not just lawyers. By 2025, Patsnap had surpassed US$140 million in annual recurring revenue. In 2025, it posted a 20 per cent year-on-year growth, driven by AI-led innovation and launched PatentBench, an industry-first artificial intelligence (AI) benchmarking tool for patent novelty search, which compares the performance of generative AI models—including Patsnap’s proprietary agents and systems such as ChatGPT—on complex intellectual property tasks. Patsnap now counts Disney, Nasa and Tesla among its more than 15,000 clients across 50 countries.

As a principal clinical pharmacist at the Singapore General Hospital working with critically ill patients, Dr Jasmine Ong sees daily how artificial intelligence (AI) can either help or harm the people it is meant to serve. That frontline experience drives her work as a clinician-innovator: building AI systems that are safe, trustworthy and designed around the realities of clinical care. She is the first Singaporean pharmacist to be awarded the US-ASEAN J William Fulbright Scholarship to the University of California, San Francisco for health AI research. She also received a national competitive grant to develop AI-assisted monitoring for post-chemotherapy patients, and leads Polaris-GM, an international collaboration developing practical governance guidance for the use of generative AI in medicine.

As artificial intelligence (AI) moves into hospitals, financial institutions and government agencies, the question of whether these systems can be trusted becomes critical. Yifan Jia founded Aidx Tech in 2023 to answer it, providing independent evaluation and testing of AI systems to help organisations identify risks before deployment. The company was selected for the inaugural cohort of Singapore’s AI Tester Accreditation Programme and is recognised as a testing partner in the AI Verify Foundation’s Global AI Assurance Pilot from 2025 through 2026. In 2025, Aidx Tech also collaborated with Singapore’s national healthtech agency, Synapxe, and the Ministry of Health to launch the country’s first joint testing lab for AI safety and compliance in healthcare. That same year, Jia was named to the Singapore 100 Women in Tech list.

Joel Leong, a 2017 Gen.T honouree, co-founded ShopBack in 2014 on the idea that shopping should be more rewarding for consumers and more measurable for brands. The cashback and rewards platform now serves more than 60 million shoppers across 13 markets and drives more than US$5.5 billion in annual sales for over 20,000 merchant partners. In 2024, the company went through a rough patch, reducing its workforce by nearly a quarter and shuttering its buy-now-pay-later service—moves that marked a deliberate shift towards sustainability after a period of rapid expansion. In the 12 months to March 2026, ShopBack posted more than 30 per cent revenue growth and six consecutive quarters of adjusted Ebitda profitability—a key metric showing it is making a profit from its core, day-to-day operation. The company has also expanded into the US as its 13th market and crossed S$1 billion in total cashback paid to users globally.

Sam Lo has spent more than a decade building a creative practice across street art, large-scale murals, sculpture and institutional commissions. The 2020 Gen.T honouree has served as the art director for the Chingay Parade, Singapore’s largest annual multicultural street showcase, since 2023, and in 2025 took on his most prominent roles yet: serving as the art director for Singapore’s milestone 60th National Day Parade (NDP) and as the festival director of the PAssionArts Festival. That same year, his artwork lit up UOB Plaza 1 as a key feature of the NDP’s expanded SG60 canvas—part of a massive collaborative light installation that broke three Guinness World Records. His commissions span Nike, Mercedes-Benz and Riot Games, with murals in cities from Amsterdam to Los Angeles.

Hariss Harun is Singapore’s national football team captain with 149 international caps and 11 goals. He earned his first national cap at age 16—the youngest Singaporean ever to do so. He also won the 2015 AFC Cup with Malaysian club Johor Darul Ta’zim, becoming the first Singaporean footballer to attain continental glory. In 2025, he led Singapore’s national team to qualify for the AFC Asian Cup 2027—the country’s most significant football milestone in a generation. He currently serves as a vice-president of the Football Association of Singapore Council and is working to give professional footballers a formal voice in decisions affecting their careers and welfare.

Read more: Artist Sam Lo reflects on identity, art and pride 10 years after his brush with the law

In 2022, Nathania Ong made history as the first Singaporean to play Éponine in Les Misérables on London’s West End. She repeated this feat in 2024, portraying Eliza Hamilton during her one-year stint in Hamilton at Victoria Palace Theatre. In 2026, she reprises her breakout role as Éponine for Les Misérables: The Arena Spectacular world tour and takes on Elle Woods in the Singapore Repertory Theatre’s production of Legally Blonde. In September, Ong will reveal a different side to her through Honest, her debut solo concert featuring the music that first drew her to performance.

Althea Lim co-founded Gushcloud International with Vincent Ha in 2011, when the business of managing online creators had no established playbook. The company now manages more than 20,000 creators across 13 territories spanning Asia-Pacific, the US, the Middle East and Europe, with four divisions covering talent management, content production, brand building and live commerce. In 2025, it acquired the creator network asset of Paris-based Wizdeo—one of Europe’s largest YouTube-certified creator platforms—marking its first stake in the region and adding more than 500 creators and 700 million monthly views to its stable. A 2020 Gen.T honouree, Lim’s goal is for Gushcloud International to represent US$1 billion in annual creator income globally.

All information provided is accurate at the time of publishing

See the full list of Gen.T Leaders of Tomorrow 2026 across Asia

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