Singapore University of Technology and Design
8 Somapah Road, Singapore, 487372
Overview
SUTD is established to advance knowledge and nurture technically grounded leaders and innovators to serve societal needs. Its undergraduate students are granted either a Bachelor of Engineering or a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in one of its four areas of focus, called "pillars": Architecture and Sustainable Design (ASD), Engineering Product Development (EPD), Engineering Systems Design (ESD), or Information Systems and Technology Design (ISTD). It also offers an MIT–SUTD Dual Master’s degree program, a full-time program leading to a degree from both MIT and SUTD. SUTD also offers Ph.D. degrees in each of its four pillars. The university opened its doors at its Dover Road interim campus in April 2012. Its permanent campus at Changi opened in January 2015. It is located in the eastern part of Singapore.
- Total investments
- 1
- Lead investments
- 0
- Investments · 12mo
- 0
- Active investors
- 6
Sector focus
- Education
Investment portfolio
- Betterdata
Participated · Seed · Apr 2023
Betterdata builds programmable synthetic data using generative AI and privacy engineering to create fictional datasets that mirror real-world data without disclosing sensitive information. Its technology leverages generative adversarial models, transformers and diffusion models to generate and augment datasets. The company is developing support for single-table, multi-table and time-series datasets to address different tabular data needs. Betterdata was founded in 2021 by Dr. Uzair Javaid and Kevin Yee and is based in Singapore. It has R&D partnerships with two major universities in Singapore and the United States and counts Shanghai Pudong Development Bank among its clients. The startup plans a product launch, will hire sales and marketing staff, and aims to expand across the Asia-Pacific region over the next one to two years. BetterData provides a platform that converts uploaded structured user data into anonymized, synthetic copies while avoiding storing raw data on its servers. User data is tokenized and stored on a blockchain that is only accessible with a user’s private encryption keys, enabling immutable access logs and end-to-end data lineage. The synthetic outputs maintain key statistical properties of the originals while anonymizing and scrambling sensitive fields so teams can train models and build products without accessing live user data. Founders Uzair Javaid (CEO) and Kevin Yee (CTO), who met at the Entrepreneur First program in Singapore, have backgrounds in AI data generation and blockchain security. The company is targeting customers in Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) and data/AI teams at tech companies, and is expanding its private beta after successful pilot programs. BetterData also positions its architecture to reduce risk of data attacks and leakages through encryption and blockchain controls. The product currently focuses on structured data; the team plans to add text-generation functionality using NLP models and launch a public cloud beta by the end of the year. The startup has raised $770,000 in funding and grants to date and is in the process of closing a seed raise.