New Strategic Partnership Between TRIVE and ICON Foundation
Plans for Blockchain courses in Southeast Asia and green lane access to the ICON Network
L to R: Ting Yan LECK (Director, CoderSchool Vietnam), Yi Ming NG (Partner TRIVE), Christopher QUEK (Partner TRIVE), JH Kim (Foundation Council Member, ICON), Jay Kim (Foundation Council Member, ICON), Henry Hyunil Lee (Head of Global Business, ICON)
May 30th, 2018, SEOUL — TRIVE (previously known as “TRi5 Ventures”) announced its strategic partnership with ICON Foundation (“ICON”), one of the largest blockchain networks in the world. The strategic collaboration, arguably the first of its kind in the traditional Venture Capital industry in Southeast Asia, is aimed to educate, equip and empower the regional startup and blockchain community.
Leveraging TRIVE’s regional network and ICON’s technological expertise, the two parties will be co-developing ICON focused blockchain courses to be taught through TRIVE’s programming schools, Upcode Academy Singapore and Coder School Vietnam. As ICON’s strategic partner in Southeast Asia, TRIVE will also provide green lane assessments of startups for expedited access to support from ICON. This would accelerate the development of new blockchain products from Southeast Asia onto the ICON network. The overarching goal is to unify various blockchain assets across the region to realise the potential of blockchain for Southeast Asian economies.
“TRIVE believes the Venture Capital industry will evolve tremendously. Our strategic partnership with the ICON Foundation will enable us to equip our startups and community with intellectual and relationship capital leveraging the technology and expertise of ICON, one of the largest global blockchain networks. Our mission has always been to create value for startups beyond just providing funding. This strategic partnership further reinforces our mission and helps us be more relevant in the era of the blockchain. We look forward to working closely with ICON to support the blockchain ecosystem in Southeast Asia.” said Yi Ming Ng, Partner at TRIVE.
“The ICON Foundation’s purpose is to promote and develop new technologies and applications in the fields of open source and decentralised software architectures. The partnership with TRIVE will allow ICON to not only educate the public on blockchain technology, but also expand ICON’s ecosystem and community. Singapore and Vietnam are at the center of blockchain innovation in Southeast Asia, and we are excited to work with TRIVE to further realise the full potential of blockchain in this region.” said JH Kim, Foundation Council Member of ICON.
Development for ICON specific blockchain curriculum for Southeast Asia is already underway and is expected to be available through Upcode Academy Singapore and Coder School Vietnam later this year. Additionally, TRIVE welcomes promising blockchain startups in Southeast Asia to get in touch and explore how they can access the ICON network.
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About
TRIVE (trive.vc)
TRIVE (previously known as “TRi5 Ventures”), is an early stage Southeast Asia (SEA) focused Venture Capital firm based in Singapore. TRIVE invests in technology startups from the seed to series A rounds of funding. The team has over 7 years of VC, mentoring and advisory experience. TRIVE has provided more than 1500 one-on-one advisory sessions, advising more than 800 startup founders and supporting 40+ startups in various domains including Deep Technologies, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Marketplaces and FinTech.
ICON Foundation (icon.foundation)
ICON is one of the largest blockchain networks in the world. ICON boasts independent blockchains comprised of reputable institutions in major industries. ICON aims to build a decentralised network that allows independent blockchains with different governances to transact with one another without intermediaries. Founded in 2017, ICON’s headquarters are located in Zug, Switzerland.
Coder School Vietnam (coderschool.vn)
Coderschool is founded in 2015 by Charles Lee and Harley Trung, two computer science graduates who hail respectively from UC Berkeley and Yale in Silicon Valley. Since then, the school has conducted 23 programming cohorts with 312 graduates here in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
CoderSchool alumni work at leading tech companies such as Uber, Grab, Fossil, TinyPulse, Lazada, Okiela, Sentio, Saleshood, Zalora, Mingle, Wizeline, 2359 Media, and Silicon Straits.
CoderSchool’s curriculum, originally developed in Silicon Valley, is based around real-world examples, multi-modal learning, and carefully-spaced repetition. In addition to several weeks of discussion, lecture, and hands-on lab time, students spend much of their time building real-world applications from scratch.
Upcode Academy Singapore (upcodeacademy.com)
UpCode Academy was started in September 2017 and has run 16 courses for over 300 students here in Singapore. Its courses include Data Science and Machine Learning, Hardware Engineering, Fintech and Web and Mobile App Programming.
UpCode Academy hires current working professionals as instructors to teach students. The goal of this strategy is to make sure the engineering being taught are on the cutting edge of industry standards. The company is currently working with engineers from Google, Airbnb, Grab and Carousell.
UpCode Academy was started by ZP Lee — a college dropout who built 40Tasks, a mCommerce platform that rode the wave of Singapore’s flash deals trend from a few years ago. Lee is a self-taught coder who is now capable enough to lecture part-time at Singapore Polytechnic and Singapore Management University.
