Ideas to impact: NTUpreneur's GET Innovation Grant backs student ventures
The Growing Entrepreneurial Talents (GET) Innovation Grant supports NTU students in transforming early ideas into testable ventures, providing seed funding and mentorship to build first prototypes.
The valley between a promising idea and a working prototype is where most student ventures stall. What founders need at that stage goes more than a business school curriculum — it is seed capital, structured feedback and space to experiment.
NTU’s Growing Entrepreneurial Talents (GET) Innovation Grant, administered by the NTU Entrepreneurship Academy (NTUpreneur), is built around that premise. The grant targets student-led innovation at its earliest stage, enabling teams to test concepts, develop prototypes and explore business models before committing to a full venture path.
Since its launch in November 2024, the programme has run three cycles, attracting around 150 applications and funding 30 student-led projects — signalling demand for structured, early-stage support within the university ecosystem.
Supporting early-stage innovation
The grant is designed to be accessible. Teams only need to have one full-time NTU student, and the application asks for a pitch deck and business proposal — enough to surface whether a team has a clear problem worth solving, a credible solution and a realistic plan to pursue it. Shortlisted applicants then pitch in person, where judges probe those same questions with more scrutiny.
Successful teams walk away with up to S$5,000, which helps students to move from whiteboard to working prototype. Equally important is what the money comes with: mentorship, consultation access and workspace at Innovation Port at Wee Cho Yaw Plaza. For students still finding their footing as founders, that combination of capital and guidance often matters more than either element alone.
Furnishes: Bringing certainty to one of life’s most expensive decisions
One venture to emerge from the programme is Furnishes, a platform developed by NTU student Shen Junxi and her team to simplify home furnishing and renovation decisions.
The problem they have identified is familiar to anyone who has bought furniture online: it is difficult to know how a piece will look — or fit — inside an actual room. In compact urban housing, where floor space is at a premium, that uncertainty translates directly into costly purchasing mistakes.
Furnishes addresses this by combining design inspiration, visualisation tools and purchasing options in a single interface. Users upload a floor plan, experiment with furniture arrangements digitally and set budgets before buying — a workflow that draws on the visual discovery model of platforms like Pinterest while layering in 3D visualisation and interior design guidance.
The team has already shipped an early minimum viable product. Their own surveys indicate strong consumer appetite: a significant share of respondents reported difficulty with furniture purchasing and expressed interest in tools that allow them to customise and visualise designs before committing.
With grant support, the team is now refining the platform and building partnerships across the furniture and interior design ecosystem.
Rust Traceless: Automating the fight against industrial corrosion
While Furnishes rethinks a consumer decision, another GET-supported team is operating at a different scale — one where the consequences of failure are measured in structural damage, accidents and economic losses running into the trillions.
Metal corrosion costs the global economy an estimated US$2.5 trillion annually, yet the dominant response — manual inspection and removal — is slow, hazardous and unreliable, with failure rates approaching 60% and nearly half of all damage going undetected.
That is the problem Rust Traceless was built to displace. Led by Shi Yi, the venture’s intelligent robotic system integrates surface inspection, rust removal and protective coating in a single autonomous workflow, using computer vision and LiDAR navigation to identify and treat corroded areas without human hands on the surface.
Independent testing validated the approach: 91.2% rust recognition accuracy against 76.5% for the nearest competitor, with a 50% reduction in session time and a 60% drop in accident rates. Priced at S$9,000 — with a per session rental option — the system targets industrial operators in construction, shipping and manufacturing across China and Southeast Asia. The grant funding supported prototype upgrades and the third-party validation that industrial buyers require before any serious commercial conversation.
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"Being recognised by NTU’s entrepreneurship ecosystem sent a signal to potential clients, to partners, and honestly to ourselves, that what we were building had real merit. In the early stages of a startup, that kind of external validation is hard to put a price on. The GET Grant was an early chapter in our story — but one we will keep referring back to, because it helped define what kind of company we are becoming.” Shi Yi (MSc TIP), CEO, Rust Traceless.
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