Mohammed Khambhati
The excitement lasted about as long as it took his roommate to ask one question.
Mohammed Khambhati was in his dorm at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) when he learnt that Afore Capital, a San Francisco pre-seed firm, was backing his startup. “Dude, I just got funded. I have to go to San Francisco (SF). I’ve got to drop out,” he remembers saying. The reply: “Your scholarship? How?”
That was the SGD85,000 (about US$65,000) question. Taking the money from Afore meant surrendering the SUTD scholarship, taking leave from the university and walking away from the kind of path Singaporean parents frame and hang on the wall.
Khambhati was determined: “If you want to do something extraordinary, you probably have to make some decisions that aren’t ordinary either,” he says.
Also Read: Building something real: How young founders are turning ideas into ventures
He told his family about his decision to move to SF only after the investment terms, scholarship surrender and leave paperwork were signed. “They were angry for a while, which I can understand.” The mood, however, has softened since his startup, now called Makeable.build, took its total raise to US$1 million.
A medic’s question with no answer
The company Afore first backed was not Makeable. It was Neural Drive, a low-cost wearable that reads brain signals and eye blinks so paralysed stroke patients can communicate. Its origin lies in an ambulance. Khambhati served as a Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) medic during National Service, and one emergency-department encounter never left him.
A patient’s son asked whether his father would be okay. Behind them, doctors were lifting the man’s arm, tapping and asking, “Pain or not? Pain or not?” Khambhati offered reassurance. The son shouted back: “How can you tell me my dad’s going to be okay? The doctors are literally guessing and checking.”
“I felt helpless,” he says. What followed was 13 months of self-study through MIT OpenCourseWare and home-built prototypes before he recruited teammates, including co-founder Raymond Ng, from Singapore’s hackathon circuit — part of a wave of Gen Z founders across Asia building before they graduate. Ng had already been co-founder and COO of Resumify, an AI resume tool explored with Yellow Ribbon Singapore and the Singapore Prison Service to help people find work after prison.
On paper, Neural Drive had momentum: a relationship with Tan Tock Seng Hospital and about SGD92,000 (roughly US$71,000) in grants for clinical-trial work. But hackathons had taught him a hard lesson. “Being good at building something doesn’t automatically mean you’ve built a business,” he says, a gap Southeast Asia’s healthtech startups keep running into.
93 doors in the Tenderloin
On arrival for Afore’s Founders in Residence programme, the team booked cheap housing in Tenderloin, a high-crime neighbourhood located in downtown San Francisco. “We saw the price and thought, why is this so cheap? Great, let’s take it. We understood why when we got there.” Coming from Singapore, the drug activity on the streets was a shock.
There was no time to settle in. In the first week, they visited 93 hospitals, clinics and rehabilitation centres hunting for a partner willing to run a clinical trial. Answers were either no, or costs starting at around US$200,000, against the US$250,000 they had raised. It meant one trial could have swallowed almost the entire cheque.
Khambhati with co-founder Raymond Ng
Khambhati rejects the tidy post-mortem that “there was no market”. The need was real, he insists; what was missing was an affordable route into US healthcare without a major university or a far better-funded company behind them. “The Singapore progress was real; it didn’t remove that barrier in the US.”
“Little progress is also poison”
The decision to change direction came that same weekend, after about 18 months on Neural Drive. A friend’s line helped: “No progress is poison, but little progress is also poison.” Partial wins let founders tell themselves they’re nearly there while the biggest obstacle sits untouched, a trap that snares far more seasoned operators, too.
Telling Afore, a week after it had funded him and flown him across the Pacific Ocean, was the conversation he dreaded. “I was expecting to get scolded.” Instead: “Okay, you’re pivoting. What’s next?” The calm was “almost scary”.
To his credit, Khambhati doesn’t romanticise the leap. Afore’s cheque and the residency made the move possible: “I don’t want to pretend I arrived in SF with nothing.” What they couldn’t buy was certainty.
Going home was never considered. He explains why in gaming terms. Singapore’s path feels like a battle royale: spend five years on a failed startup and you emerge to find friends have levelled up while you restart from the bottom. San Francisco feels like a game where you respawn. “Failure didn’t feel like a reason to go home. It felt like a reason to try again.” It’s a generous read of the Valley, but a pointed one about risk appetite back home.
From brain signals to a desktop pet
What came next is Makeable, which wants to do for physical products what AI coding tools did for software. Users type an idea into a box and AI works out the parts. Makeable sources and ships them with 3D-animated, Lego-style assembly instructions. Longer term, it wants AI to build users’ storefronts while Makeable handles supply, packaging and shipping.
The team built it from scratch in about six weeks, and Afore added US$750,000, taking the total to US$1 million. Khambhati won’t split that between product and founders, but the second cheque speaks for itself.
The first product, Ember, is a desktop creature that eats the tokens your AI coding agents burn. In other words, the desktop pet grows as its owner uses AI tools such as Claude and Codex. Ember aimed squarely at San Francisco’s prompt-all-day crowd.
Khambhati claimed that orders for Ember arrived from several countries within two weeks; early batches have gone to friends, investors and supporters, with preorders closing ahead of broader production.
Has he traded stroke patients for something easier and trendier? His answer is a non-technical gardener who used Makeable to build a dashboard showing his plants’ water levels from sensors — then returned saying his friends wanted to buy one. “The gardener, the schoolteacher, the person collecting our rubbish… They shouldn’t have to become engineers before they can do something about them.”
Atoms are less forgiving than code
The pitch is seductive, but hardware punishes optimism. Khambhati concedes that designs which look fine on screen can fail in the hand: parts don’t fit, connections are wrong, materials aren’t strong enough. Each mistake costs materials, shipping and time, and a generated design “isn’t proof that something is ready to manufacture or sell”. Physical testing and safety checks still apply — and will matter more once kits become products sold to strangers.
Nor is Makeable alone in trying to democratise making. Arduino and Adafruit have long sold electronics kits to hobbyists, while AI app builders such as Lovable and Bolt have made “describe it, get it” the expectation for software.
Closer to home, Singapore’s Stick ‘Em, a Hult Prize winner, sells chopstick-based robotics kits to teach children. Makeable’s wager is that stitching AI design, sourcing and fulfilment into one flow is defensible — unproven at volume, as Asia’s hardware makers know well.
Also Read: What scaling in Asia teaches you that Silicon Valley doesn’t
Arguments with co-founder Ng are settled by experiment, not volume. Monday to Thursday tests one approach, Friday reviews it, and the weekend sets up the other’s idea for the following week. “The results aren’t always perfectly apples to apples, but at least they’re fruits to fruits.”
Some costs never reach a cap table. Ask what he misses and the answer is instant: laksa, chicken rice, hawker food. “You can be happy you moved and still miss the life you knew.”
Ember, he says, matters not because it’s a desktop pet but because it’s the first thing that came out of starting again.
For a founder who swapped a scholarship for a respawn (for a character in a video game to come back to life after being defeated, killed, or removed from the game world) button, that may be the most honest metric yet.
The post Afore funded him, flew him to SF, then watched him scrap the plan in a week. They didn’t flinch appeared first on e27.
Mohammed Khambhati
The excitement lasted about as long as it took his roommate to ask one question.
Mohammed Khambhati was in his dorm at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) when he learnt that Afore Capital, a San Francisco pre-seed firm, was backing his startup. “Dude, I just got funded. I have to go to San Francisco (SF). I’ve got to drop out,” he remembers saying. The reply: “Your scholarship? How?”
That was the SGD85,000 (about US$65,000) question. Taking the money from Afore meant surrendering the SUTD scholarship, taking leave from the university and walking away from the kind of path Singaporean parents frame and hang on the wall.
Khambhati was determined: “If you want to do something extraordinary, you probably have to make some decisions that aren’t ordinary either,” he says.
Also Read: Building something real: How young founders are turning ideas into ventures
He told his family about his decision to move to SF only after the investment terms, scholarship surrender and leave paperwork were signed. “They were angry for a while, which I can understand.” The mood, however, has softened since his startup, now called Makeable.build, took its total raise to US$1 million.
A medic’s question with no answer
The company Afore first backed was not Makeable. It was Neural Drive, a low-cost wearable that reads brain signals and eye blinks so paralysed stroke patients can communicate. Its origin lies in an ambulance. Khambhati served as a Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) medic during National Service, and one emergency-department encounter never left him.
A patient’s son asked whether his father would be okay. Behind them, doctors were lifting the man’s arm, tapping and asking, “Pain or not? Pain or not?” Khambhati offered reassurance. The son shouted back: “How can you tell me my dad’s going to be okay? The doctors are literally guessing and checking.”
“I felt helpless,” he says. What followed was 13 months of self-study through MIT OpenCourseWare and home-built prototypes before he recruited teammates, including co-founder Raymond Ng, from Singapore’s hackathon circuit — part of a wave of Gen Z founders across Asia building before they graduate. Ng had already been co-founder and COO of Resumify, an AI resume tool explored with Yellow Ribbon Singapore and the Singapore Prison Service to help people find work after prison.
On paper, Neural Drive had momentum: a relationship with Tan Tock Seng Hospital and about SGD92,000 (roughly US$71,000) in grants for clinical-trial work. But hackathons had taught him a hard lesson. “Being good at building something doesn’t automatically mean you’ve built a business,” he says, a gap Southeast Asia’s healthtech startups keep running into.
93 doors in the Tenderloin
On arrival for Afore’s Founders in Residence programme, the team booked cheap housing in Tenderloin, a high-crime neighbourhood located in downtown San Francisco. “We saw the price and thought, why is this so cheap? Great, let’s take it. We understood why when we got there.” Coming from Singapore, the drug activity on the streets was a shock.
There was no time to settle in. In the first week, they visited 93 hospitals, clinics and rehabilitation centres hunting for a partner willing to run a clinical trial. Answers were either no, or costs starting at around US$200,000, against the US$250,000 they had raised. It meant one trial could have swallowed almost the entire cheque.
Khambhati with co-founder Raymond Ng
Khambhati rejects the tidy post-mortem that “there was no market”. The need was real, he insists; what was missing was an affordable route into US healthcare without a major university or a far better-funded company behind them. “The Singapore progress was real; it didn’t remove that barrier in the US.”
“Little progress is also poison”
The decision to change direction came that same weekend, after about 18 months on Neural Drive. A friend’s line helped: “No progress is poison, but little progress is also poison.” Partial wins let founders tell themselves they’re nearly there while the biggest obstacle sits untouched, a trap that snares far more seasoned operators, too.
Telling Afore, a week after it had funded him and flown him across the Pacific Ocean, was the conversation he dreaded. “I was expecting to get scolded.” Instead: “Okay, you’re pivoting. What’s next?” The calm was “almost scary”.
To his credit, Khambhati doesn’t romanticise the leap. Afore’s cheque and the residency made the move possible: “I don’t want to pretend I arrived in SF with nothing.” What they couldn’t buy was certainty.
Going home was never considered. He explains why in gaming terms. Singapore’s path feels like a battle royale: spend five years on a failed startup and you emerge to find friends have levelled up while you restart from the bottom. San Francisco feels like a game where you respawn. “Failure didn’t feel like a reason to go home. It felt like a reason to try again.” It’s a generous read of the Valley, but a pointed one about risk appetite back home.
From brain signals to a desktop pet
What came next is Makeable, which wants to do for physical products what AI coding tools did for software. Users type an idea into a box and AI works out the parts. Makeable sources and ships them with 3D-animated, Lego-style assembly instructions. Longer term, it wants AI to build users’ storefronts while Makeable handles supply, packaging and shipping.
The team built it from scratch in about six weeks, and Afore added US$750,000, taking the total to US$1 million. Khambhati won’t split that between product and founders, but the second cheque speaks for itself.
The first product, Ember, is a desktop creature that eats the tokens your AI coding agents burn. In other words, the desktop pet grows as its owner uses AI tools such as Claude and Codex. Ember aimed squarely at San Francisco’s prompt-all-day crowd.
Khambhati claimed that orders for Ember arrived from several countries within two weeks; early batches have gone to friends, investors and supporters, with preorders closing ahead of broader production.
Has he traded stroke patients for something easier and trendier? His answer is a non-technical gardener who used Makeable to build a dashboard showing his plants’ water levels from sensors — then returned saying his friends wanted to buy one. “The gardener, the schoolteacher, the person collecting our rubbish… They shouldn’t have to become engineers before they can do something about them.”
Atoms are less forgiving than code
The pitch is seductive, but hardware punishes optimism. Khambhati concedes that designs which look fine on screen can fail in the hand: parts don’t fit, connections are wrong, materials aren’t strong enough. Each mistake costs materials, shipping and time, and a generated design “isn’t proof that something is ready to manufacture or sell”. Physical testing and safety checks still apply — and will matter more once kits become products sold to strangers.
Nor is Makeable alone in trying to democratise making. Arduino and Adafruit have long sold electronics kits to hobbyists, while AI app builders such as Lovable and Bolt have made “describe it, get it” the expectation for software.
Closer to home, Singapore’s Stick ‘Em, a Hult Prize winner, sells chopstick-based robotics kits to teach children. Makeable’s wager is that stitching AI design, sourcing and fulfilment into one flow is defensible — unproven at volume, as Asia’s hardware makers know well.
Also Read: What scaling in Asia teaches you that Silicon Valley doesn’t
Arguments with co-founder Ng are settled by experiment, not volume. Monday to Thursday tests one approach, Friday reviews it, and the weekend sets up the other’s idea for the following week. “The results aren’t always perfectly apples to apples, but at least they’re fruits to fruits.”
Some costs never reach a cap table. Ask what he misses and the answer is instant: laksa, chicken rice, hawker food. “You can be happy you moved and still miss the life you knew.”
Ember, he says, matters not because it’s a desktop pet but because it’s the first thing that came out of starting again.
For a founder who swapped a scholarship for a respawn (for a character in a video game to come back to life after being defeated, killed, or removed from the game world) button, that may be the most honest metric yet.
The post Afore funded him, flew him to SF, then watched him scrap the plan in a week. They didn’t flinch appeared first on e27.
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