AI 100 Singapore: Biks Joins the 100-Founder AI Cohort

What is the AI 100 Founder Leadership Series?

The AI 100 Founder Leadership Series is an eight-week programme for AI-native founders building from Singapore, somewhere between first customers and seed. It meets every Monday in person at SQ Collective, with online workshops and expert one-to-ones on Thursdays.

It runs as six weeks to build and two weeks to pitch. The build weeks run from 2 November to 11 December 2026. Pitch coaching starts on 11 January 2027, and an investor and customer showcase follows in the week of 18 January. Founders are, in the organisers' words, "selected, not self-selected".

**A hundred founders, picked by a jury. That is a cohort, not an audience.**

The real value is the room, not the curriculum

Most of what a programme teaches can be found online. What cannot be downloaded is density: the right people close enough to talk every week. That is the bet behind SQ Collective. Michael started it because most co-working spaces bored him, and he caps membership so everyone on the floor has a real chance of meeting everyone else.

AI 100 applies the same idea to a cohort. Founders are grouped into pods at the same stage, and meet them every Monday for six weeks. For a young AI company, the founder who solved your pricing problem last month is worth more than a lecture on pricing.

**Advice is everywhere. A peer who is one step ahead of you, every Monday, is not.**

Investors before the pitch, not after it

Most founders meet investors for the first time when they ask for money. AI 100 flips that order. Every Monday evening, a different investor talks openly about how they see deals: Peng T. Ong of Monk's Hill Ventures, Hsu Ken Ooi of Iterative, Jeffrey Paine of Golden Gate Ventures, Anandamoy Roychowdhary of Crane VC, Aditya Mathur of Elev8 VC and Bruno da Silva of 1MX.AI.

Alex Feyler, who runs Startup Stage Asia, leads the fundraising weeks on how pre-seed and seed rounds get done in Singapore and the US. By January, founders have heard six GPs explain what they want before standing up to pitch them.

**A warm room beats a cold inbox. You pitch better to people whose questions you already know.**

AI products need their own playbook

An AI product breaks the usual startup rules in specific ways. It does not always give the same answer twice. Customers ask how you know it is right. Costs move with every model release. The programme names these problems directly: evals, designing for systems that vary, model choice, agents and cost.

That matters to us more than most. Rapi™ is a private AI analyst on WhatsApp for finance leaders in Southeast Asia, and in finance, trust is the product. Every figure Rapi™ produces links to its source, and it says when it cannot verify something. Sharper evals make that promise stronger, not just the demo.

**In AI, the product is not the answer. It is the reason to believe the answer.**

What Biks brings, and what we want from it

Rapi™ is already used by senior executives in Indonesian banking and finance, and together the banking executives using it oversee more than US$55 billion in assets. We built it in Southeast Asia, for Southeast Asia's rules, filings and boardrooms. We wrote about why executives want this inside the chat they already use in ChatGPT alternative for executives.

From AI 100 we want three things: an enterprise go-to-market plan that works beyond Indonesia, honest feedback from investors who back regional AI, and a pitch tested on real customers in January, not only on investors. The showcase puts both in the room, which is rare.

We will write up what we learn as the weeks go on. For how we read this year's AI economics, see what Anthropic's IPO numbers mean for AI users.

**The goal is not to graduate from a programme. It is to leave in January with customers and a round in motion.**