In the five seconds you take to read this sentence, ShopBack would have received at least one order from its over seven million users in 7 countries across the Asia Pacific, who peruse the offerings from more than 2,000 merchant partners.

It is hard to imagine that this popular shopping platform – which connects online retailers and online shoppers with a mutually beneficial reward system – had its beginnings in a small NUS Enterprise office in 2014.

ShopBack was born one night when NUS Overseas Colleges alumni Henry Chan (Faculty of Engineering) and Joel Leong (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) were toying around with entrepreneurial ideas in a car. They then roped in tech guru Bryan Chua (School of Computing), and after a week locked up in a hotel room, the trio conceived a prototype.

Despite an initial setback when their application for government funding was rejected, ShopBack eventually secured funding amounting to over USD$1 million, led by Accel-X and East Ventures.

ShopBack has since seen phenomenal growth. Today, it has a team of over 100, and has launched in Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and Taiwan, Thailand and Australia.

“NUS Enterprise started off giving us infrastructural support, such as a roof over our heads, internet access, free coffee and tea! In addition, they went on to provide us mentorship, legal and accounting assistance and exposure to relevant networks. This played a huge role in propelling our growth, allowing us to remain focused on building the core business. Moving forward, we aim to on board new merchants and provide more cash- back to our shoppers. This will help us to expand to become the smartest way to shop in the Asia Pacific region,” said Henry Chan, CEO and Co-founder ShopBack.