Women in
Tech (Asia)
Conference

Shao-Ning is the Chief Angel and co-Founder of AngelCentral (www.angelcentral.co). AngelCentral started as a rapidly growing community in Feb 2018 to facilitate angel investments in Singapore, and has now over 500 angels in its network. Seeing the enthusiasm and support from the community, Shao-Ning together with Teck Moh and Der Shing, decided to incorporate and provide deeper angel training and investment support, with the key mandate to bridge good angels with good start-ups in South East Asia.

Shao-Ning meets with around 5-7 startups weekly as a possible investor and also shares her experiences with some of them. The startups are mainly technology startups, with verticals ranging from Medical to HR to Education to Food Tech. Whenever she can, she tries her best to support entrepreneurship causes, especially for women executives / founders. For the past few years, Shao-Ning focuses on three aspects in her life, being an angel investor, startup advisor, a wife and mother to four boys ages between 3 and 16.

Previously, Shao-Ning was the Managing Director/ Group Deputy CEO of JobsCentral Group (now CareerBuilder Singapore) She started the company as a fresh graduate in 2000, grew it from a two-man team to 150-pax regional business, and sold it in 2011 to the US market leader, CareerBuilder. Her life focus is to be relevant and pay it forward, helping wherever she can.

Raised in Amsterdam, based in Singapore. Olivier Bos squeezes his creative brain juice in realising visionary concepts into reality- physically and/or virtually.

He has experiences in ideating and executing a 3D printing application usage for children, Virtual Reality for elderlies and other impactful initiatives. With strong interest in audio visual productions and digital marketing strategies, Olivier has uphold himself as an invaluable asset at MeshMinds.

In his role as Chief Inspiration Officer at MeshMinds, Olivier fosters an uplifting environment and ensures a dynamic relationship with artists and partners in delivering live projects and programmes. His strong communication and creative thinking skills enhance MeshMinds as an impact investor in creative technology for good.

Uma Thana Balasingam is Vice President of Channels & Sales, Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ) for Riverbed. She is responsible for defining the region’s go-to-market strategies including channel, service providers and alliances. As a key member of the leadership team, she plays an active role in shaping the company’s growth strategy in the region. She was recognized in May 2018 in CRN’s The Most Powerful Women of the Channel list.

Uma has 17+ years’ experience in business and strategic channels development in the APJ region. Prior to joining Riverbed, she served approximately 8 years at EMC in various senior leadership roles that included new product sales, alliances, acquisitions, channels sales, strategy & planning. She previously held roles in management at Brocade and field sales at IBM, starting her career as a systems engineer.

Uma is the co-founder of Lean In Singapore and the founder of Lean In Women in Technology Asia & Women In Technology Singapore which has >700 members today. LeanIn.Org was founded by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to empower women to achieve their ambitions. Lean In Singapore, founded in 2016, is a community of over 2000 women & men that comes together to be inspired, empowered and educated with a focus on driving gender diversity in the workplace.

Uma has a Bachelor of Computer Science and Management Information Systems from University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur.

Helen is a founding partner of GreenOcean Group, a sustainable business consultancy focused on helping companies grows profitably through addressing social and environmental issues.

She is passionate about diversity and inclusion across gender, generations and geographies. Helen founded the Singapore Chapter after reading Lean In and being unable to accept that unless there is significant change gender parity will not be achieved in her lifetime. She is committed to do her part, however small, in empowering women to Lean In to their career aspirations.

Kay Vasey is founder and Chief Connecting Officer of MeshMinds, an impact investor in creative technology for good.

MeshMinds specialises in brokering public-private partnerships to build bridges between the art and technology worlds. Team members include experts covering VR, AR, 3D printing, IoT and AI, working with creators on ideas to drive the sustainable development of people and our planet. Prior to founding MeshMinds, she was an international technology lawyer focused on multimedia content licensing. Whilst Head of Arts at The British Council, she spearheaded ground-breaking artist-in-residence programmes between Singapore and the UK and took the lead on the Memorandum of Understanding with the Singapore International Foundation. She is passionate about the power of human connections to enable positive action for a better world.

Dillah is the Creative Technology Lead of creative agency – BBH Singapore.

She is a creative and tech production hybrid who loves pop culture and understands the business of tech to work along with advertising, marketing, and branding. She was listed as Ad Age’s ‘Creatives You Need to Know’ 2018 and as a part of the pioneer team member of a tech startup that was acquired by Google, she spends her free time mentoring young female creatives and tech startups.

Shiyan is a Managing Partner at Hustle Fund, a pre-seed fund investing in Southeast Asia and North America.

Prior to Hustle Fund, she was the VP of Business Operations and Corporate Development at NerdWallet, a consumer finance business she helped scale from 10-450 employees. She was previously an investment professional at Bridgewater Associates and Institutional Venture Partners. Shiyan holds a BS in Biomechanical Engineering from Stanford University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Lathika Pai is the Managing Director, Microsoft for Startups, which supports startups in India, the Middle East, and SAARC countries. Microsoft for StartUps engages with early stage and typically Series A funded B2B startups by providing them with Azure credits and technical guidance. The ScaleUp program does a deep dive with each startup to identify their strategic, technology and GTM roadmap, and then bring them on board Microsoft Marketplace and co-sell ready globally.

Her prior work experience includes large technology companies in the US and the UK like Nortel, American Management Systems (CGI) and a $300million funded startup Relera which was in the cloud and managed services space. As a serial entrepreneur, Lathika successfully raised capital for her ventures both through equity and debt funding, as well as provided profitable exits to her investors. She has been on the Indian Boards of international technology companies and helped them with their strategy for Asia.

Lathika is also the Founder of SonderConnect, an organization that discovers, empowers and promotes women entrepreneurs looking to scale their business and raise funds through targeted mentoring and a robust, supportive community of executives, leaders, and founders. Lathika strongly believes that helping female entrepreneurs scale their business will be of huge impact on the global economy at large.

Felix is responsible for driving awareness and adoption of the AWS Educate program with education institutions and Public Sector organizations. He conducts various technical workshops to educate students and empower educators with knowledge on AWS Cloud services, and how they can utilize them for projects and in the organization.

Audrey is a digital, marketing, advertising and business leader with more than two decades of expertise and experience in these fields that span a wide spectrum of industries and regions. She was also the founder of a business and marketing consulting company, Litmus Asia Pacific.

In her experience, she has worked in leading global marketing communications companies such as J. Walter Thompson, Mindshare, MAXUS and MediaCom and as a client side marketer in travel, hospitality and financial services.

Audrey joined the Dentsu Aegis Network firstly as CEO, Singapore, Aegis Media Singapore in October 2011, before moving to a role as Chief Client Officer, Southeast Asia and then assumed the role to head up the Group’s first ever R&D Centre, headquartered in Singapore from June 1, 2016.

The Dentsu Aegis Network Global Data Innovation Centre is the network’s first-ever R&D centre of its kind. Supported by the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), the Singapore-based centre will research on how new technologies and methods can be combined with our deep marketing and advertising expertise to develop proprietary and large scale marketing products and platforms fit for the digital economy.

Audrey was awarded an MBA from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2007 and graduated with a B.A. from National University of Singapore in 1992.

Dr Silvia Pfeiffer is Coviu’s CEO and Co-founder, driving the global mission of Coviu of universal access to healthcare. With over 15 years of experience building new Web video solutions, Silvia has worked at leading corporations including Google, Mozilla, NICTA and CSIRO.

Silvia has worked as a co-editor on the HTML5 standard and continues to contribute to Web standards. Silvia and co-founder Nathan Oehlman spun Coviu out of the CSIRO in March 2018. Coviu is Silvia’s second startup after a Web video analytics company.

Silvia has a double degree in computer science and business management and manages sales, marketing, investments, and product strategy at Coviu.

Remalie is the Creative Intelligence Lead for Google, Asia Pacific, helping brands to maximize the creative power of Google’s platforms and technologies.

Working side-by-side internal cross functional teams, to inspire, consult and educate key creative partners and push the boundaries of Google technology. Previous to this role, Remalie lead the brand & creative strategic regional initiatives for the agency business. Working with media agencies to devise new product, integration and adoption strategies, that improve the efficiency & accuracy of media planning through agency centric brand solutions helping move the needle for video advertising innovation in both developed and developing markets. She also holds a BA in Law & Sociology from the University of Warwick, UK.

Quinn Pham is an Analyst & Technical Project Manager with Data Driven Co. She drives data integration projects for Data Driven’s largest clients in Asia Pacific by serving as a bridge between the business decision makers and technical experts. In her role, Quinn supports clients in operationalizing digital transformation and data integration initiatives. She also develops Business Intelligence dashboards to enable the communication of key actionable insights from data in a simple and accessible way to decision makers.

Quinn also volunteers as an Instructor on data analytics for She Loves Data, a non-for-profit organization with a mission to nurture the data science, business intelligence & analytics community and inspire more women in pursuing careers in these fields.

Prior to Data Driven and She Loves Data, Quinn had four years’ experience as a Project Manager in a professional services firm, enabling business process optimization, ERP implementation, and championing data-driven decision making within the organization.

Quinn received a Bachelor’s Degree in Accountancy from Nanyang Technological University.

Dr. Andrea Wang is Director of Data Science in the Visa Consulting and Analytics team, based in Singapore. She is responsible for bringing best practice credit card lifecycle solutions to our global clients.

Prior to joining Visa, she was a data science veteran in Accenture with a focus on initiating innovative data-driven business applications and patents, and also delivered multiple end-to-end projects, such as implementing a machine learning solution to facilitate joint collaborations across various agencies to develop citizen-centric digital municipal services as well as to support the vision of Singapore’s smart nation. She has also worked as the principle data scientist for several technology start-ups.

With the mindset of ‘intrapreneurship’, her experiences and interests have focused on Industry 4.0 -related technologies and activities including artificial intelligence, Fintech, smart grids, and smart nations. She has successfully delivered big data projects within Asia Pacific across different domains, including the public sector, financial services, healthcare and natural resources..

She holds a Ph.D in Engineering from NUS, specialized in quantitative analysis and industrial automation. Outside of work, she has served as a mentor for hackathons and tech start-ups.

Aditi Rungta is a Senior Software Engineer in Visa’s Data Product Development team. She is responsible for the design and development of business processes under Visa’s marketing services function and is committed to the vison of converting every transaction into an opportunity. Currently the co-inventor of multiple trade Visa secrets and patents (pending approval at the US Patent office), she was also nominated as Visa’s candidate at the ‘Next Business Leadership Program’ at the American Chamber of Commerce, Singapore.

Prior to working at Visa, Aditi was responsible for data integration and reporting projects for American pharmaceutical companies at ZS Associates, India.

Aditi holds a Master of Science in Digital Media from NTU, Singapore and a Bachelor of Engineering on Computer Science from B.I.T Mesra India. Apart from her daily work, she co-chairs various employee engagement initiatives at Visa, which include organizing regular knowledge sharing talks for the Singapore Technology team and driving the Visa’s Women in Technology initiative for Marketing Services team.

Shakiya Sha is a senior software engineer in Visa’s Data Product group where she designs and develops applications for the Product Loyalty team, supported by her years of experience in back-end application development.

She previously worked as an engineer at Mindtree Ltd. And a Junior Research Assistant at ADSC. She’s also the co-creator of a LAN-based treasure-hunting game.

Shakiya holds a Master of Computing (specialised in Computer Science) from NUS.

Leanne Robers is an entrepreneur, advisor to startups and community builder. She is the Head of Singapore for She Loves Tech, the world’s largest pitch competition focused on women in technology. She also heads up the Pitch Perfect programme at CRIB, which helps female founders get connected to Angel investors. She has also founded a diverse portfolio of businesses, including Comish (an art x technology platform), a fintech service platform and a lifestyle company that built and managed boutique hotels and F&B outlets. Prior to her startup journey, she worked at corporates in the UK and across SEA covering a variety of roles, including business development, consulting and leadership.

She holds a BS in Psychology and an MSc in Leadership and Management from the University of Pennsylvania.

Rachel Wang graduated with a BSc (Hons) from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and a PhD in Chemical Biology from the Harvard Medical School. She was one of 40 picked for the prestigious McKinsey Insight program.

After Harvard Medical School, she worked as an assistant director at NTUitive Ptd Ltd. As Assistant Director of Ntuitive Pte Ltd, the commercialization arm of the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), she has been responsible for commercializing NTU technologies through licensing deals with MNCs and raising seed funding for startups. In 2015, she co-founded d’Optron Pte Ltd with Prof Anand Asundi to provide real-time 3D imaging solutions across multiple sectors. As CEO of d’Optron, she has successfully led d’Optron to win local and international awards such as Germany’s manufacturing association’s AMA Young Enterprise Award 2016 and First Prize at the She Loves Tech Singapore(the largest global startup competition for women and technology) in 2018.

In addition, as CEO, she has led d’Optron to successfully attract the interests of global industry players such as Samsung, Polytec, HP, Seagate, etc. In 2016, she was nominated as one of Prestige 40 under 40.

Estella Chen is the founder and CEO of MandarinX. Previously, she was a professor at universities conducting business English courses at college of commerce.

She obtained her Master’s degree from the University of Southern California (USC) where her passion for applied linguistics began to take root. She also earned her doctoral degree from the USC’s Rossier School of Education, whose dissertation on online Mandarin learning won the Dissertation of the Year award. Her research interests and practical experiences are increasingly sought after among online language education professionals and academics.

Selected by Inc.’s Magazine as one of the Silicon Valley investors you must know, Edith Yeung a partner at 500 Startups. She invests in mobile, AI, and blockchain startups, including Stellar, Nebulas, Hooked, DayDayCook, Silk Labs (acquired by Apple), Fleksy (acquired by Pinterest), Human (acquired by Mapbox), AISense, Penrose, Cryworks, Piper, Apptopia, Palantir and many more.

Before 500, Edith ran marketing for Dolphin Browser, a Sequoia-backed mobile browser with over 150 million installs worldwide. Edith also worked with many Fortune 500 companies such as Siebel, Oracle, AMS, AT&T Wireless and Autodesk. You can also find some of her work on BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, CBS , NPR, Techcrunch, Next Web, Mashable, Read Write Web, Fora, etc. She frequently speaks on China & Silicoin Valley investment landscape.

Diana is an active angel investor who invests in compelling early stage start-ups globally. She is a member of the steering committee of AngelVest group, Asia’s most active international investment group and provides strategic leadership in the growth and development of AngelVest operation and investing activities.

Most recently, Diana was an executive with United Technologies based out of China and the United States. Diana started her career in management consulting with the Haygroup now KornFerry Haygroup in Singapore. She was later hired by her client where she would move to Shanghai, China that started her corporate career to build their Greater China team. With her specialities in ramping up startups, carving out & closing operations, Diana held leadership roles in TNT, Intel and United Technologies with increasing responsibility from regional roles in Asia Pacific and Middle East to global roles in the United States heading global R&D engineering human resources.

Widely recognized for her ability to spot talents as well as her unique blended experience in corporate and start-up environments, Diana is passionate about bridging the two to collaborate on innovation that aims to disrupt and create tremendous value for the next leap of business growth.

Diana has a B.A. in Economics and Geography from the National University of Singapore and a Masters in applied commerce from the University of Melbourne.

Emily is the President & Co-Founder of FREDsense Technologies, and the winner of the 2018 She Loves Tech Global Startup Competition.

FREDsense is an early stage biotechnology company working on creating novel biosensors for contaminants in wastewater. Stemming from an award-winning project for the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition, the technology uses a unique combination of engineered bacteria and electrochemistry. Emily is involved in the wet lab as well as on the business end.

Emily graduated from the University of Calgary in 2013 with 1st Class Honors in a Bachelor of Health Science, Biomedical Sciences.

Jason J Sosa is the CEO at Blackbox Foundation, a purpose-driven organization focused on the Decentralized Future of Work (AI+blockchain).

Previously founded a Techstars/VC-backed computer vision company which sold to Kairos in 2015, EIR/advisor to Socialatom VC fund. Product strategist with Occipital (Bridge VR mixed reality headset), InfoScout, IoT, Sentiment Analysis, and 3D Body Scanning.

Speaker, writer, panelist – Singularity University Global Summit, Inman, ICO CROWD, Forbes, TEDx, MIT Enterprise Forum, NYC Meetup, Detroit Regional Chamber. Also featured as an entrepreneur in the New York Times, Wired, Fast Company, Techcrunch, and Business Insider.

Vanessa Ching Radd is Founding Partner of the XR Alliance and is recognized as one of the global Top 50 changemakers in the field of virtual reality. Radd is also the founder of the XR Women in Asia Society.

Radd is a practitioner of Aikido, a Japanese martial art.