# Ellen Cheng

> Ellen Cheng is based in Singapore and works with AI founders going global on narrative, market entry and fundraising. She writes founder interviews and analysis, hosts 离线时间 (a Chinese-language podcast on AI founders going global), and curates Arrivals, a running log of AI companies landing in Singapore.

## Arrivals

- [Arrivals (Markdown)](https://ellencheng.com/arrivals/index.md): AI companies and founders arriving in Singapore, with the signal (new entity or regional HQ, funding, local hiring, speaking at Singapore events), date and source for each. Updated weekly.
- [Arrivals (JSON)](https://ellencheng.com/arrivals/data.json): the same entries as structured data.
- [Arrivals (RSS)](https://ellencheng.com/arrivals/rss.xml): new entries as they are logged.
- [Arrivals (web page)](https://ellencheng.com/arrivals/)

## Writing

- [Writing index](https://ellencheng.com/writing/): founder interviews and analysis on AI founders going global, from Singapore.
- [YC Just Named the Model. Two Founders in Singapore Have Been Running It for 18 Months.](https://ellencheng.com/writing/yc-just-named-the-model-two-founders-in-singapore-have-been-running-it-for-18-months/): Y Combinator spent fifteen years funding software and almost no services. Its latest batch has nine AI-native service companies — an AI law firm, an AI accountant, an AI insurance broker — and a Startup School session teaching founders how to build one. The thesis is clean: don't sell software to accountants, do the accounting. I sat down with two founders in Singapore who arrived there on their own, eighteen months earlier, and who have already hit three walls the thesis doesn't mention.
- [He Was Painting Walls in Australia. Now He's Putting Chinese AI Hardware in Harvey Norman.](https://ellencheng.com/writing/he-was-painting-walls-in-australia-now-hes-putting-chinese-ai-hardware-in-harvey-norman/): Chris Liu was a product manager at Weibo and Alipay, then a three-time founder. He landed in Australia in 2024, went undercover in a furniture store, and spent a few days as a painter's assistant. On why Australia is the market everyone skips, why you can't sell AI tools to a country of small businesses, and why closing deals there is easier than in China.
- [Every Major Food Brand Has No AI Strategy. She Spent 10 Years Inside the Industry Learning Why.](https://ellencheng.com/writing/every-major-food-brand-has-no-ai-strategy-she-spent-10-years-inside-the-industry-learning-why/): Aria Wang went from ADM — one of the world's four largest agricultural traders — to INSEAD to building AI agents for food and beverage companies. On why tech and food can't understand each other, how AI-simulated consumers hit 90% correlation with human panels, and what she learned winning a Google DeepMind hackathon with no technical background.
- [From Tencent's AI Lab to Replacing Your Accountant](https://ellencheng.com/writing/from-tencent-ai-lab-to-replacing-your-accountant/): Mao Hua spent eight years building Tencent's AI systems — from IoT to voice to computer vision. Now he's in the US, turning a finance agent into a full-service accounting firm. His take on why the cloud is about to get radically simpler, and why your MacBook will run your company's AI within two years.
- [He Built Asia's Largest Startup Accelerator at Huawei. Now He's Replacing the SDR.](https://ellencheng.com/writing/huawei-startup-ecosystem-to-ai-sales-agent/): Leo Jiang went from BT and Vodafone to building Huawei's Spark program — 7,000+ startup applications across five continents. Then he left to build an AI sales agent. On why outbound sales is the perfect AI use case, why SaaS is ending, and why the future is agent-to-agent commerce.
- [The Case for Edge AI: From NIO's Data Center on Wheels to a Medical Device on a Desk](https://ellencheng.com/writing/the-case-for-edge-ai/): Hu Chenchen went from Tsinghua professor to Xilinx Asia CTO to NIO's chief expert to AI startup founder. His thesis: the last decade belonged to the cloud, but the next decade belongs to the edge. A medical AI device that costs 1/20th the power and 1/60th the volume just proved him right.
- [What Hinton Taught Me Was Curiosity. LLMs Are Just Undergrad Math Done Very Deep.](https://ellencheng.com/writing/hinton-taught-curiosity/): Hinton's student, Wall Street quant, now building AI infrastructure for recruiting in Singapore. On why matching people is harder than matching information, China's SaaS graveyard, and why agentic AI is the next AlexNet.
- [The Most "Singaporean" AI Company I've Seen](https://ellencheng.com/writing/most-singaporean-ai-company/): Most AI companies in Singapore have nothing to do with Singapore. ShipLinker is different — it could only have grown here. On AI brokers for maritime chartering, and why Singapore's best AI companies are the ones local capital can't see.
- [Why Software Won't Die: SaaS, Vibe Coding, and Building on Probabilistic Ground](https://ellencheng.com/writing/why-software-wont-die/): A former Microsoft engineer rebuilt his product three times in two years because the model kept getting better. On why SaaS went wrong, why LLMs can't think, and why software will outlast AI hype.
- [Both Sides Are Lying: AI, Film, and the War Between Creators and Engineers](https://ellencheng.com/writing/ai-film-both-sides-lying/): Jasmine bridges China's tech and creative worlds in AI filmmaking. On why both sides are secretly contradicting themselves, what "Chinese-to-Chinese translation" means, and why AI's hardest problem isn't technical.
- [Taste Is Seeing Something Deeper Than Everyone Else](https://ellencheng.com/writing/taste-is-seeing-deeper/): From Hitachi to Didi to Roblox to global product coach. Allen on cross-market growth, what taste actually means, and why doing things that were previously impossible is the only real "need" — everything else is just a spec.
- [What China's Top AI Coding Startup Taught Me About Building on Shifting Ground](https://ellencheng.com/writing/what-chinas-top-ai-coding-startup-taught-me/): A $200M AI coding startup backed by Sequoia and Tencent. Their VP of Engineering shared frameworks for surviving model updates that I haven't heard anyone articulate publicly before.
- [AI Gave Me My Peak at 40+](https://ellencheng.com/writing/ai-gave-me-peak-at-40/): A former Nasdaq-listed CTO who replaced his entire tech team with AI subscriptions. On taste, first principles, and why this revolution will surpass all industrial revolutions combined.
- [What GEO Really Is: Getting ChatGPT and Google to Recommend Your Product](https://ellencheng.com/writing/what-geo-really-is/): CapGo AI's YG left Citi to build AI-powered SEO at scale. On why guaranteeing traffic is a scam, and why vertical B2B is the only real moat in AI.
- [What Singapore's EDB Actually Tells AI Founders About Setting Up Here](https://ellencheng.com/writing/what-singapores-edb-actually-tells-ai-founders/): I brought an AI infrastructure founder to meet EDB. Practical takeaways on EP applications, tax incentives, and why most founders get the order wrong.
- [How an AI Company Became Singapore's 6th Largest Egg Trader](https://ellencheng.com/writing/how-an-ai-company-became-singapores-6th-largest-egg-trader/): Five people, 2,000 restaurants, and a WhatsApp-first supply chain. The most interesting AI company in Singapore sells eggs.
- [What Alibaba's Pic Copilot Taught Me About AI Going Global](https://ellencheng.com/writing/what-alibabas-pic-copilot-taught-me-about-ai-going-global/): Their hot take: AI companies leading today will be overtaken — unless they convert speed into proprietary knowledge.
- [Why Maritime Needs AI Brokers, Not Platforms](https://ellencheng.com/writing/ai-shipping-broker-why-maritime-needs-ai-not-platforms/): Shipping isn't Manbang for the ocean. A Singapore startup shows why AI optimization beats marketplace matching.
- [He Started Building Four Months After ChatGPT. Three Years Later, Here's What Changed and What Didn't.](https://ellencheng.com/writing/three-years-after-chatgpt-what-changed-and-what-didnt/): Mao Hua launched an AI personal assistant in March 2023, shut it down because tokens were too expensive, and turned its finance module into ccMonet. The product changed shape several times. The logic underneath barely moved.
- [A 30-Outlet Restaurant Group on AI: The Bottleneck Was Never the Technology](https://ellencheng.com/writing/thirty-restaurants-ai-bottleneck-is-data/): The first episode of my podcast with people who don't build AI. Jerry Liao and Eric Bao run about 30 halal restaurants in Singapore. Before AI could do anything for them, they had to get the data off paper.
- [Your Team Doesn't Use Slack. Why Are You Building a Teamwork Product for the West?](https://ellencheng.com/writing/you-dont-use-slack-why-build-a-teamwork-product/): Allen Shih's second conversation on my podcast, recorded during TOKEN2049 and the F1 weekend. On treating Singapore as a base rather than a market, which categories cross cultures, and why YC now wants to see how you use ChatGPT.
- [He Spent Billions on Ads for Game Studios at Meta. Now He's Putting That Playbook Into AI Agents.](https://ellencheng.com/writing/fluency-is-not-capability-a65/): Harris Wang went from Apple's online store to Meta's gaming team, then founded A65 in Singapore to run a company's whole marketing chain with AI agents. On defining agents like interns, keeping memory out of client work, and why 91.6% is good enough.
- [Voice Is Richer Than Text and Cleaner Than Video. He Built Three AI Products on That Bet.](https://ellencheng.com/writing/voice-is-richer-than-text-cleaner-than-video/): Jia Zijian built Talkme for speaking practice, ListenLeap for listening, and Stances.ai, which answers questions only with what experts actually said on podcasts. On retrieval over generation, and why vibe coding doesn't get you your 10,000th paying user.
- [Parents Don't Lack Parenting Knowledge. They Lack It When the Child Is Screaming.](https://ellencheng.com/writing/nora-ai-parents-dont-lack-knowledge/): Mia's Nora AI isn't a parenting chatbot. Parents record five minutes with their child and get coaching on how they actually talk. On cutting the chatbot, building for clinical validation, and choosing Asia over the US.
- [One Founder, Seven Bots, 3,000 Orders: What Changes in Marketing When Execution Gets Cheap](https://ellencheng.com/writing/one-founder-seven-bots-3000-orders/): AI for Beautiful Business EP02 with Yichen Guo of CapgoAI and Ashley, who sold about 3,000 orders of her Singapore body-care brand Sukoon in eight months. On what AI took over, what it can't, and why judgment got more expensive.

## About

- [Home](https://ellencheng.com/): about Ellen Cheng and how to work with her.
- Contact: hello@ellencheng.com