“I want to help people to start companies and be wildly successful”

On weekends, Associate Professor Benjamin Tee likes to go to the East Coast Park with his wife and three-year-old son to make sandcastles.

The Katong denizen, who grew up in the Eastern part of Singapore and loves the area, is especially grateful for fatherhood as he and his wife had tried for five years to have a child before they succeeded with In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF).

But from what he calls his “traumatic” journey of trying to conceive, success was not just in the birth of his child. He channeled his desire to help other couples struggling with infertility into Hannah Life Technologies, a fast-growing venture that is supporting over 10,000 people today worldwide.

Hannah Life Technologies, which birthed the twoplus fertility wellness platform, reached double-digit percentage monthly revenue growth across international markets including the US, UK and Singapore within 12 months of launch in August 2021.

Assoc Prof Tee’s desire to solve problems – and guide others to do the same – drives his work and ambitions. He won the prestigious MIT TR35 Innovator award in 2015 and Singapore’s Young Scientist Award in 2016. Today, at NUS, he leads the Sensor.AI Systems Research Labs at the College of Design and Engineering. He is also the Associate Vice President (NUS Enterprise) and Vice Dean for Research (College of Design & Engineering).

Starting Young

As a boy, Assoc Prof Tee watched Star Wars and was fascinated not by the space battles but was instead intriqued by the protagonist Luke Skywalker’s prosthetic hand – and how the replacement hand was able to function almost like the real one.

This led to a PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford University, where his deeply creative mind drove him to create many world’s firsts,including the first self-healing electronic skins or e-skins, made with a unique composite material he designed. As a PhD student, he filed patents for over 10 inventions. But he desired to transform those inventions into workable solutions.

This opportunity came in the form of the year-long Singapore-Stanford Biodesign programme. As one of just four participants who undertook the programme in 2014 – six months at Stanford and six months in Singapore – he learnt how to systematically turn ideas into viable businesses.

After the programme ended, he launched his first start-up – Privi Medical. The company specialises in the manufacture of a drug-free product which provided immediate relief for people suffering from haemorrhoids. Founded in 2014, Assoc Prof Tee said that it was an “extremely tough” experience because Singapore’s start-up scene, especially for medical technologies, was nascent at the time. There were few investors experienced with the path to market for a medical device invention.

He recalls, “It took one year to land our first angel investment. We survived on grants and a $100,000 cash prize from winning a start-up competition. We were not able to accelerate our growth as we were resource-constrained. When our angel investor finally came in, it was a huge boost to our operations because he was very experienced with an extensive network.” Five years later, Privi Medical was successfully acquired. 

Nurturing NUS entrepreneurs

Assoc Prof Tee joined NUS at the end of 2017 because he felt that an academic career in research, translation and teaching was his calling. “I am now an entrepreneurial academic at NUS, which provides a very rich, diverse and dynamic environment for inventing. I love multi-disciplinary overlaps, and enjoy interfacing with people of diverse backgrounds to create new breakthrough ideas,” he said.

Apart from continuing his scientific and engineering endeavours via his research group to drive innovation in e-skins, Assoc Prof Tee wanted to help NUS students who were potential entrepreneurs to commercialise their inventions.

At NUS Enterprise, Assoc Prof Tee leads the Ecosystem Development pillar that drives innovation and entrepreneurship initiatives across Singapore and internationally to grow NUS Enterprise’s start-up ecosystem.

In addition, he oversees the NUS Graduate Innovation Research Programme (GRIP), an early-stage venture-creation programme that translates the university’s cutting-edge research into deep tech start-ups that develop new or improved innovative solutions.

Started in 2018, the flagship innovation programme of NUS Enterprise provides risk capital, entrepreneurship mentorship and a fundraising platform to postgraduate students and researchers. From 2024, it will be extended to NUS alumni as well.

Said Assoc Prof Tee, “I'm now contributing my expertise, experience and networks to try and help other potential founders from the NUS community start their own companies. As a platform, GRIP enables them to make as little mistakes as possible when starting.”

But true to his multi-disciplinary nature, he is still a serial entrepreneur. He has started yet another company – Tacniq.ai, which enables robot arms to “feel” – enabling them to delicately pick up an egg or do sophisticated tasks in normal human environments.

He is passionate about making a difference by providing solutions to problems that people truly care about. In this regard, the impact that Hannah Life Technologies has made is probably closest to his heart.

In one remarkable instance, he shares that a partner at Y Combinator (YC) – a US-based startup accelerator company that was supporting Hannah Life Technologies – tried out the product and the couple successfully conceived. The news emerged just before demo day, which is when the start-up presents their idea to a gathered audience of potential investors.

He said, “We probably had the most likes because we were the only company to ever get a YC partner pregnant. It was such good timing, and you can’t fake it. With that, we closed our (fund-raising) round easily and we managed to raise a seed round of over US$2 million.”

With all that is on his plate, he admits that it is not easy to balance the demands of being a researcher, academic and entrepreneur.

“But I really enjoy it,” he said. “I enjoy the challenge and stimulation of trying to solve problems that may not even be apparent today but will be important in 10 to 20 years. Doing so in an academic environment at NUS that enables the breadth and depth of experimentation is profoundly invigorating. I’m also fortunate to mentor many young talents in their entrepreneurial journeys and help them get the chance to be wildly successful!”

Text by Wong Sher Maine. Photos courtesy of Benjamin Tee and NUS GRIP.