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Built to Scale: Why VCs Back Trust-First Startups from Day One

Built to Scale: Why VCs Back Trust-First Startups from Day One

In a tech landscape shaped by breakthrough technologies and rising regulatory expectations, speed alone no longer defines success. As public-private collaboration becomes a key ingredient in startup readiness, programmes like IMDA Accreditation are giving founders the tools to scale responsibly—while offering investors early signals of market and regulatory alignment. Today’s most resilient startups are those that scale with trust—not as an afterthought, but as a foundational advantage.

For venture capital firms, trust infrastructure has become a critical lens for evaluating early-stage companies. This includes structural readiness around compliance, governance, and scalability—especially in sectors like frontier tech, AI, and enterprise software, where velocity must be matched by systemic resilience. Increasingly, programmes such as IMDA Accreditation are helping bridge that gap, offering investors clearer signals of long-term viability while equipping startups to operate credibly in complex markets.

Two such investors are Jon Sakoda, Founding Partner of Decibel, and Jenny Lee, Senior Managing Partner at Granite Asia. Both bring global perspectives on what makes a startup fundable today—and why Singapore’s trust infrastructure is earning the attention of forward-leaning venture capital.

Startups Built on Principles, Not Just Code

The success of a startup doesn’t begin with polished code or a perfectly honed product—it begins with clarity. Clarity about what makes the company unique, and why it is built to succeed where others might falter. In an environment where capital is abundant but conviction is scarce, investors increasingly look for distinctiveness that can’t be easily replicated.

"The most important thing about a startup is that it understands its uniqueness," says Jon Sakoda. "The world is a very competitive place... The more unique and different the founder’s ideas and the founder’s history and the founder's skill set—maybe counterintuitively—the more likely they will be to succeed... because very few people can replicate what they're doing, or at least the perspective that they have is not one that is easily copied."

But uniqueness without structure rarely scales. As Sakoda notes, "Everybody always starts with nothing. There’s no code. There’s just a dream; there’s just an idea... But in order to be the best,to overcome the odds and to build a great company, they need to have a set of foundational principles that they believe in, that will make their company competitive and differentiated and successful."

That foundation, once invisible, is now expected to be demonstrable. Investors aren’t just backing bold visions—they’re backing readiness. And increasingly, they’re looking for proof.

Accreditation as a Catalyst for Confidence

Readiness, in today’s climate, is often measured beyond pitch decks and growth curves. As founders seek to enter enterprise and public sector environments, having third-party validation of technical credibility and security is no longer optional—it’s expected. This is where Accreditation becomes a catalyst.

"IMDA’s Accreditation Programme provides a useful data point in assessing enterprise tech and deep tech companies," says Jenny Lee. "It gives us added confidence in their product’s scalability and security. It also helps portfolio companies go to market faster, especially with public sector and enterprise clients—an important factor in driving early growth and market traction."

The value of such programmes isn’t just in what they validate, but in what they unlock. "Government-backed initiatives that provide validation, market access, and co-investment have been particularly effective in de-risking investments," Lee adds. "These programmes not only help companies grow but also give investors greater confidence to back emerging technologies and new business models."

Still, no programme can replace the fundamentals. Accreditation only amplifies what is already structurally sound. And in the eyes of experienced investors, trust must begin long before accreditation.

Trust Isn’t Retroactive—It’s Designed In

Trust, when done right, is not something a company backfills after growth. It’s embedded in its architecture from day one. Founders who understand this build transparency not for compliance, but for strategic clarity—and investors are watching.

"The single most important thing is transparency. Trust comes from transparency," says Sakoda. "If I tell you exactly how my software is built, if I tell you exactly what my AI is doing… then you are very likely to trust that I’m doing the right thing. Even if you don’t even know whether or not those are all the right things, the mere fact that I’m showing it to you is the confidence that you need."

But transparency without accountability is fragile. As Sakoda warns, "The biggest mistakes are to assume that you are above the law because the rules have not yet been written... Technology outpaces regulation. But that does not mean that you are above the law... I want clarity on how we can follow the rules together."

Why Singapore Wins: Infrastructure for Global Tech

If governance is the new growth infrastructure, then Singapore is already laying the blueprint. The country’s national commitment to responsible innovation, talent development, and cross-border scalability has made it a trusted base for companies looking to go global.

"Singapore already has been a leader in this space," says Sakoda. "The country is relatively far along in thinking through how AI should be introduced into its own economic society, and it has written its own frameworks for things like AI governance, which has been open sourced as well—very few people even knew they should be writing rules, let alone sharing them with the world."

This leadership extends beyond policy into the talent pipeline. "The attractiveness of Singapore is that it’s a country that has tried to be an early adopter of AI technology... teaching AI engineering inside of your major technical universities... your population happens to have an incredibly technical base that comes out of university... you're winning all the competitions."

And the next wave of talent is already claiming its name. "He has coined this term ‘AI engineering,’" Sakoda explains, referencing one of his partners. "AI engineering is the wave of development that you see today, which is not just machine learning, but actually using language models to advance the skills of an engineer... It’s like—I was a software developer engineer, and now I’m an AI engineer. Effectively, I have superpowers. He believes that Singapore can be the AI engineering nation."

"Singapore has built a unique position as a trusted gateway to Asia," adds Lee. "Combining a stable regulatory environment, strong rule of law, and world-class infrastructure... its connectivity to regional markets and pro-business policies aligned with long-term national strategies give investors confidence to back transformative technologies here."

Public-Private Partnerships as Growth Accelerators

None of this happens in a vacuum. As startups scale and regulations evolve, trust infrastructure must evolve too—and that requires collaboration between government, founders, and capital. Public-private models are emerging as force multipliers that align commercial momentum with regulatory foresight.

"Public-private partnerships are at the heart of Singapore’s innovation engine," says Lee. "Through partnerships with agencies like IMDA, we’ve seen faster market readiness for emerging tech... The accreditation and sandbox programmes help de-risk early-stage innovations, while talent development efforts ensure companies we invest in can access the right skill sets as they grow."

She points to the success of initiatives like NextGen Tech 30: "It was built to address a critical gap—ASEAN’s lack of visibility for growth-stage tech champions and the limited capital market pathways for scaling companies... we built a credible, regional platform that now serves as a benchmark for high-growth tech."

The complexity of aligning public and private priorities is real—but so is the reward. "A key challenge has been aligning diverse stakeholders—government, VCs, corporates—around common selection and support criteria. But this also became an opportunity... The collaborative approach, where public and private sectors co-curate and support the companies, magnifies the impact—providing not only recognition but also follow-on access to capital and partners."

A New Playbook for Fundability

For today’s startups, success will hinge not just on speed to market, but on clarity of structure and scale of trust. Investors are looking not only at what companies build—but how they’re built to last.

"There’s no such thing as being too early to understand what the rules of the game are and how you can compete and win, given the geopolitics of AI and regulation," says Sakoda. "… There’s no such thing as too early."

Governance is no longer a late-stage correction—it’s a day-one design principle. "Naivete is a power," Sakoda continues. "But if they don’t understand the rules of the game, then they’re going to get themselves in trouble... You need to teach people that there are vulnerabilities that need to be addressed, that there are compliance rules that need to be followed, and if you don’t do those things, you’re going to get yourself in a lot of trouble before we’re even out in the market."

In the new era of frontier tech and digital trust, startups built for transparency, accountability, and scalability won’t just attract capital—they’ll define the global market standard.

LAST UPDATED: 05 AUG 2025

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