A new home for big ideas to thrive
The new UOB Innovation Hub gives startups and spin-offs the space, infrastructure and networks to turn bold ideas into ventures that make societal impact.
NTU’s newest innovation space opened its doors on 25 March. The UOB Innovation Hub — two storeys of incubation rooms, co-working spaces and shared infrastructure for NTU students, researchers and alumni building ventures — aims to support more than 90 venture teams and deep-tech startups over the next five years. The new innovation facilities are supported by a landmark S$110 million gift pledged by UOB and the Wee Foundation. With government matching, the gift creates an endowment of up to S$275 million — one of the largest philanthropic contributions in NTU’s history.
The building continues to serve its academic functions, with smart classrooms and a multimedia library sitting alongside the new spaces. NTU students coursing through the building’s classrooms will see their peers and professors building ventures next door, making entrepreneurship feel less abstract and more within reach.
“The Innovation Hub is a space where members of the NTU community can push the frontiers of innovation by taking risks, testing bold ideas and turning them into solutions that could change the world,” said NTU President Professor Ho Teck Hua. “It will help incubate the next generation of start-ups and develop them into SMEs of the future.”
Professor Louis Phee, NTU Vice President (Innovation & Entrepreneurship), describes the hub as “a launchpad where founders can build their ventures with minimal infrastructure costs, while focusing on products that truly matter.”
There are plans to expand the hub beyond its current two floors, with future levels housing makerspaces for prototyping, media studios, teaching spaces for NTU’s innovation and entrepreneurship curriculum, as well as interdisciplinary collaboration zones where deep-tech teams can work alongside social sciences and humanities researchers on solutions with wider societal impact.
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Mr Heng Swee Keat, Chairman of the National Research Foundation, who was the Guest of Honour during the hub’s unveiling, said the hub reflects a wider national priority. “I trust the hub will nurture promising ideas into viable ventures, addressing real-world problems.”
NTU has launched more than 470 startups and spin-offs over the past decade, collectively raising over S$600 million. For founders like those at PQStation and Synvo AI — who until recently worked out of research labs with no dedicated office — the hub is the first space they can call their own.
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