Bryan Oh, an entrepreneur, has risen to the top of the prestigious list of the world’s most promising young people thanks to his creative solution to the poisonous battery problem.
Oh realized there was a greater purpose for his problem-solving abilities while he worked as a management consultant.
He noticed that the rise in electric vehicles left more toxic lithium batteries in landfills. So, he and his buddy Kenneth Palmer founded Neu Battery Materials in 2021.
Since then, the startup has created the first patented electrochemical separation method for recycling lithium batteries worldwide.
Thanks to their achievements, Palmer and Oh were on Forbes ninth annual list of promising young people in Asia-Pacific.
Oh told The Straits Times: “It’s a big honor… and this is a testament to me and Kenneth.
“Our recycling process has the ability to drastically reduce emissions, and our next step is to scale up and build a commercial recycling factory.”
Oh, and Palmer is two of the 35 Singaporeans from 27 submissions to be on Forbes yearly 30 Under 30 Asia list for 2024. A single entry on the list represents a group of co-founders of the same business.
There are 27 entries from Singapore in the ten categories, totaling 35 individuals.
Three hundred leaders and entrepreneurs under 30 from Asia-Pacific are included in the list.
Thirty entries were chosen for each of the ten categories—the arts (including fashion, food, and drink), venture capital and finance, media, marketing, and advertising, retail and e-commerce, enterprise technology, industry, manufacturing, and energy, healthcare and science, social impact, and consumer technology.
Of Singapore’s 35 delegates, 11 are foreign nationals with permanent residence in the country.
Veronica Shanti Pereira, 27, a sprint queen.
Regina Ho, 29, a senior associate at Rakuten Ventures.
Also, Johnson Lim, 29, the co-founder of GetGo, are among the Singaporeans.
The list also included the 26-year-old co-founders of Beep, Benjamin Long and Kristoffer Jacek Soh. They founded three enterprise IT startups.
The other mentioned Singaporeans are Nigel Giam, 29, co-founder of Corsiva Lab, a digital marketing agency.
Kit Yong, 29, founder of Forte Biotech, an agriculture tech startup.
Evan Heng, 26, founder of Zenith Learning Group, a chain of tutoring centers.
Through its two brands, Zenith Education Studio (JC/Secondary School) and Zenith Academy (Primary School), Zenith Learning Group provides tutoring services to pupils between the ages of seven and eighteen.
The 2019-founded company has also dabbled with educational technology, developing the e-learning program Zendora, which enables elementary school pupils to study science, math, and English.
In July 2023, Zenith secured US$1.4 million (S$1.88 million) from a fundraising round headed by East Ventures and investment firm Trihill Capital.
Heng said: “It has been an incredibly fulfilling journey over the last five years. We aim to expand the scale of our impact by continuing to expand rapidly in Singapore and eventually to the rest of South-East Asia.”
With 86 entries in Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia, India tops the Asia region, followed by China and Japan with 32 each, Singapore with 27, Australia with 26, and Indonesia with 18.
