A bit about myself, my name is Henry. Apologies upfront for the info dump, but thought maybe this would save some time for you if I summarised all my info here, one shot.
I studied Engineering in Oxford University, and specialised in decentralised AI (strictly speaking, decentralised optimisation algorithms), these are some the research papers I worked on.
The optimiser is still available for use here.
Some of my professors included Andrew Zisserman, the father of Computer Vision from the Visual Geometry Group and Google DeepMind.
After university, I joined my professor’s spin-off from the Oxford Robotics Institute in the UK that made autonomous vehicle software for:
- The European space agency (e.g. mars rovers)
- Automotive companies (e.g. Ocado for supply chain automation, British Petroleum etc)
I joined as an early machine learning engineer when the startup had less than 30 people. I first worked on the touch screen display of the autonomous vehicle, similar to this. The original video is not available because the company rebranded from Oxbotica to Oxa after investment by Google.
But also worked on the machine learning models that detect traffic lights and obstacles on the road, using Lidar and Radar.
The startup is now a unicorn scale-up, post Google and Tencent investment
If you ever get the chance to visit London, and see any autonomous vehicles on the road, there is more than a 50% chance the cars are from Oxa 😄 It’s probably the leading robotics company in the UK now (and some say Europe!).
After that, I came back to Asia, and continued working on AI and web3. Out of serendipity, went to a web3 meet-up and got to know the CoinGecko and Etherscan founders, and also met the would be founding team of my next project there.
We then started a company, with me as CTO, venture funded. Built a mobile app that gamifies the sleep-to-earn experience, I coded up the AI algorithms using Transformers too, the models run on the client side, which was a huge pain to get it to work but preserves privacy and maintains performance:
The app had more than 6300 downloads, and engagement rates of over 22%. Towards the end of 2023, team noticed the uptrend in DeFi activities, and pivoted to a borrow/lending platform. Stayed through the transition, and helped restructure the team and build the MVP, then took a step back as advisor.
While I was working on the mobile app in the WeWork office, we had 2 office neighbours - Virtuals Protocol and Jupiter Aggregator. I saw the founding teams every week in the office, and we were building together throughout the tough bear market.
Around the time of the pivot, Solana Foundation noticed that there were really great builders in the region, and asked Jupiter if they were interested in doing ecosystem building work for Solana. Jupiter wanted to focus on product, so they suggested the guy next door.
Hence, I started Superteam Malaysia, a chapter of Superteam , Solana Foundation’s key partner in incubating projects to build on Solana.
Here are some of the proof of work that we’ve done in the past year:
Partnerships and BD: Startup Village Founder’s event
Community building: Solana APAC Summit Conference
Collectively we’ve helped builders start more than 200 projects, out of which we have 5 global hackathon winners from the region selected from a cohort of 3000+ projects. Also generated over 200,000 USD in grants, investments, and business to the region. The global hackathon is a selection process to Solana’s Colosseum Accelerator
Community Meet-ups: Wormhole Workshop
Airfoil x Helius Meetup
Our Global Solana Hackathon DeFi 1st prize
Our Global Solana Hackathon Infra 5th prize
Currently, I am helping some of the projects above to fundraise and to build too especially in the Web3 x AI space.
I love Product Management, BD, Growth, Ecosystem Building.
My Links
A walk down memory lane
Machine Learning engineer at Oxa.tech
Web3 Ecosystem Building at Solana Superteam
Nation building talks on both Web3 and AI.
With the former Prime Minister of Malaysia to receive an award for outstanding achievement in education.
Hosted panel talk with Coingecko and Halogen Capital (first Securities Commission approved crypto fund in Malaysia) on how to navigate the local regulatory landscape. Nation building