Gracy Fernandez’s research while affiliated with The National Drug Information Center and other places

In 2005, Min-Liang Tan co-founded Razer with Robert Krakoff in Singapore. Razer’s first product was the Boomslang, a high-end gaming mouse, the rights of which the co-founders had secured from a failed business.

In 2014, Patrick Grove founded iflix in Malaysia, with backing from his Catcha Group, the digital group he founded in 2004.

Chitpol Mungprom founded Zanroo with Udomsak Donkhampai in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2013. As a marketing technology company, Zanroo began by offering a social listening platform. Zanroo later created Arun, which allows companies to track their return on investment across owned media, earned media, and paid media. The company is currently active in 15 countries and employs more than 160 people. The company is expected to become the first unicorn from Thailand and a world leader in marketing tech.

Siu Rui Quek founded Carousell in Singapore in 2012 with Lucas Ngoo and Marcus Tan. Prototyped over the course of a Startup Weekend, Carousell is a consumer-to-consumer marketplace with a focus on mobile technology. With over 250 million listings, Carousell is one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing marketplaces in Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong

In 2010, Chih-Han Yu co-founded Appier with Joe Su and Winnie Lee in Taiwan. Prior to Appier, Yu spent most of his career studying computer science in academe, earning a bachelor’s degree in the field from National Taiwan University, followed by a master’s degree at Stanford University, and finally, a PhD from Harvard University.

Chatri Sityodtong, an MBA graduate from Harvard Business School (USA), founded ONE Championship in Singapore in 2011 after a successful career on Wall Street. He returned to Asia to launch ONE Championship because he wanted to unite the region by creating Asia’s first global sports media property to celebrate Asia’s greatest cultural treasure, martial arts.

Zeeshan Ali Khan built and launched his first batch of online portals with his brother Imran Ali Khan’s help to much fanfare in the UK. Following up on this success, he expanded his operations to Canada, Australia, and the US, before relocating to his Pakistani homeland.

In 2014, Ron Hose co-founded Coins.ph with Runar Petursson. Coins.ph began as a cryptocurrency marketplace, although the co-founders knew that they wanted to pursue the larger opportunity in creating a digital wallet of choice in the Philippines. Hose had the necessary expertise to build this product, having graduated from Cornell University with a master’s degree in computer science and serving as the co-founder and CTO of TokBox, which was acquired by Telefonica Digital in 2012.

In 2010, Singapore Management University alumnus Willis Wee founded Tech in Asia in Singapore after recognizing a gap in the global coverage of technology and startups. Most media outlets focus on Silicon Valley startups, even though Asia is increasingly home to the world’s most promising tech companies and has a growing regional readership eager to learn about them.

Founded by Mark Sears in 2011, CloudFactory addresses two problems at once. First, the shortage of jobs in emerging markets like Nepal, and second, the structural gaps in traditional outsourcing models. Inspired by Henry Ford’s assembly line framework, the platform splits up work into smaller tasks and delegates these simpler, more manageable workloads to the CloudWorkers on CloudFactory. This streamlines how individuals accomplish whatever has been outsourced to them, allowing them to do more, and hence, earn more without sacrificing quality. Client businesses are then able to focus their efforts on higher-value work.