From exchange floor to innovation board: A capital markets view of university deep tech
Capital markets veteran Chew Sutat, who spent 14 years taking companies to market at SGX, brings an investor’s eye to NTU’s deep-tech ambitions and the decade ahead.
From taking companies public at the Singapore Exchange (SGX), to widening access to private markets, to backing deep tech at NTU, Mr Chew Sutat has worked at nearly every stage of how good ideas find capital. He spent 14 of those years on the executive management team at the SGX, helping transform the bourse into a global multi-asset exchange, and now leads the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Singapore as its CEO. From his seat on the NTU Innovation & Entrepreneurship (NTU I&E) Advisory Board, Mr Chew sets out what the markets look for in university-born ventures, and where the next decade leads.
Starting with the end in mind
What drew you to NTU’s I&E Advisory Board, and what could capital markets experience bring to university innovation?
Public capital markets are brutal. They reward success and failure alike with a daily mark to market that reflects precisely what investors think you are worth. You have to start with the end in mind, with discipline about investability and who your investors will be. This can feel millions of miles and dollars from a young company seeking its first grant or SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) note, but the questions we must ask are the same.
How has investor appetite for university-born deep tech changed, and what’s driving the shift?
University-born deep tech was once a niche, high-risk allocation, or the preserve of corporate co-labs. That has changed.
More VCs now treat it as core strategy, alongside consumer software and SaaS, and in many countries, it has become part of government strategy.
The arrival of AI has commoditised general software ventures, so deep-tech spinouts built on science-based IP now offer investors a more durable moat. AI is also being woven into scientific discovery, which speeds the move from lab prototype to commercial viability. Geoeconomics matters too: technological independence, advanced semiconductors and quantum computing have become questions of national sovereignty, and governments and sovereign funds have been active in backing these sectors, including those with defence applications.
What investors are really buying
You’ve spent your career on the capital side of that divide. What friction points actually stall or kill a venture’s journey to market?
The best tech does not sell itself. The journey from research to prototype to first sale depends on convincing the right
funders at each stage, and they need to see more than promising research. There has to be a clearly identified market need, a viable hypothesis that can be borne out, a grounded plan for going to market, and credible paths to monetise and scale. A business moat matters as much as a technical one.
This takes entrepreneurial skill and the flexibility to adapt. Sometimes translating an innovation into commercial use means pivoting away from the founder’s original thesis, and that pivot becomes the hinge that produces a far more widely adopted application. There is an old case study of a corporate lab trying to make a strong adhesive that instead produced a weak, reusable glue in 1968. Years later that failure found its purpose, and it is with us still as the Post-it Note!
What stands out about NTU’s I&E ecosystem, and what would make its spin-offs even more compelling to investors
The holistic approach is compelling: entrepreneurial education, venture building, incubation and broad industry partnerships, all anchored on real research strength. NTU’s spin-offs have increasingly shown strong research translation, scalability and investor traction, in areas including power infrastructure, quantum cybersecurity and sustainability. Accelerator programmes such as the National Graduate Research Innovation Programme (GRIP) and Activate Global Fellows SG are well placed to catalyse more.
What would make them even more compelling is greater awareness among global investors. NTU could do more to
highlight its success stories and showcase promising spin-offs, working with partners in markets that offer deeper pools of capital.
Building global champions
The regional landscape is getting more competitive. How should NTU’s innovation pipeline be positioned over the next decade?
It is encouraging that support now runs across the whole chain. At one end, agencies like the National Research
Foundation provide national backing. At the other, the Equities Market Review Group’s recommendations have lifted our
public capital markets, with a potential pathway to the US through the new SGX–Nasdaq dual listing bridge. The Growth
Capital Workgroup convened by MAS is strengthening private and start-up funding in between. NTU I&E should stay close to these developments and make sure our pipeline is plugged into them, positioning our ventures for the pooled investment vehicles that could give Singapore’s most promising companies sustainable early-stage funding.
If you could change one thing about how deep-tech ventures move from lab to market, what would it be?
Perception. A Singapore venture with ingredients similar to one from the Valley should be seen through the same valuation lens by our own investors. If it can be, I look forward to the day when global champions emerge from NTU spin-offs.
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