Alex Lin, formerly head of ecosystem development at the Singapore government’s innovation agency, SGInnovate, has joined integrated engineering group ST Engineering, Tech in Asia reported yesterday.
Lin will head corporate venturing unit ST Engineering Ventures, which was set up with $150m in capital in July 2017. The division is expected to invest in sectors relevant to the corporate’s long-term growth, such as autonomous driving, cybersecurity, data analytics and robotics.
The move was announced as ST Engineering Ventures invested $5.8m in US-based endpoint security software startup Janus Technologies, in a deal that will help it bolster its own hardware-based cybersecurity offering.
Vincent Chong, ST Engineering’s president and chief executive, said: “This is the first investment by our corporate venture capital unit in companies with cutting edge technologies or breakthrough innovations.
“Our investment into Janus Technologies will benefit not just the group’s cybersecurity business, but will also enable Janus Technologies’ organic growth as it will have access to our established business networks and channels.”
Lin left SGInnovate earlier this month, after announcing his intentions at the end of July. He had been head of SGInnovate since December 2013, when it was still known as Infocomm Investments.
Infocomm Investments was originally set up as the VC arm of statutory board Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), but the government undertook a large-scale restructuring effort of several agencies in 2016 to better support smart technologies, also turning IDA into Government Technology Agency of Singapore, or GovTech.
Lin had previously been a director at Singapore University of Technology and Design from August 2012 to October 2013, and before that was an entrepreneur-in-residence at NTU Ventures, the tech transfer office of Nanyang Technological University. He holds a PhD in cognitive science, awarded by Stanford University in 1996.
– Image courtesy of LinkedIn. The original version of this article appeared on our sister site, Global Government Venturing.