Meet the two Singaporean finalists of Bicester Collection’s Unlock Her Future prize

SHANGHAI – Two Singaporean social entrepreneurs were honoured by top luxury outlet shopping group, The Bicester Collection, at a ceremony at its Shanghai outpost on Oct 23.

Mint Lim and Sulfya Lim (unrelated to each other), both in the business of educational technology, were among 12 finalists for the brand’s annual Unlock Her Future prize. The prize has been described by its inceptor, Bicester’s chief culture officer, Chantal Khoueiry, as “Shark Tank” for women-run impact ventures.

Like in the reality TV series, shortlisted founders pitch to judges the merits of their start-ups that advance at least one of the United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals. Winners get up to US$100,000 (S$128,000) in funding, while all finalists receive personal coaching, networking opportunities and business classes spread over a year at a partner university.

Now in its fourth edition, the Bicester prize is a relatively new addition to the clutch of retail brands disbursing women-only grants – part of a luxury philanthropic, and feminist, wind.

The Bicester Collection operates 12 designer outlet destinations in Europe, the US and China, many styled like “villages” harking back to its flagship in Oxfordshire, Britain. The English mall, opened in 1995, is reportedly the second most popular site for Chinese tourists after Buckingham Palace.

Bicester’s two Chinese outposts in Shanghai and Suzhou are its only locations in Asia.

On Oct 23, a driving rain brought on by Typhoon Champi forced proceedings indoors at Bicester Village Shanghai, where some 300 guests sat cheek by jowl in a room usually reserved for apex spenders.

The reduced pomp made for a warm night that included a Q&A with Chinese actress Li Bingbing, a pre-recorded video message from pianist Lang Lang and a song performed by the finalists.

Singapore’s two Lims had beat the better part of a record 1,500 applicants in 2026, but lost out to four winners from China, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Sulfya Lim’s robotics system GoTechUp gamifies science and technology lessons, and Mint Lim’s software, School On Cloud, helps women set up micro-schools in their communities.

The winning quartet share a US$300,000 prize pot.

China’s Kyle Li runs China’s first all-female home repair squad, 38Fixers, and teaches a growing class of urban women who live alone crucial “handyman” skills. Vietnamese Nhung Tran Huyen runs a counselling service for migrant women.

Two Indonesian founders rounded out the winners. Azalea Ayuningtyas’ Birufinery turns the archipelago’s copious mass of seaweed into biostimulants for soil, as an alternative to low-yield chemical fertilisers used by local farmers; and Alfi Munajat’s HerLens makes an artificial intelligence tool for community midwives to screen rural women for cervical cancer.

For Sulfya Lim, the sisterhood of fellow women entrepreneurs gained at the week-long boot camp in the Chinese city is reason enough for gratitude, “as cringy as that may sound”, she said.

Reaching women in every region

The prize is the flagship initiative of Bicester’s Do Good programme. It debuted in East and South-east Asia in 2026 after editions in South Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa.

The travelling nature of the prize means that each run is open to just one region at a time, so there is little chance of founders who missed out on applying for previous editions getting another shot.

“We debated this a lot,” said Bicester’s Khoueiry. “But there are a lot of prizes out there and ours is differentiated. I’m a strong believer that you need to understand each part of the world. I come from the Middle East, and whilst we have the same challenges, there are certain challenges that are (peculiar) to each region.

“For us, it was important to go deep into every region with the right partners and the right judges because that is when we are able to deliver something that serves the community.”

The final round in Shanghai was judged by the former president of non-governmental organisation United Women Singapore, Georgette Tan; Bicester chair and global chief merchant, Desiree Bollier; actress Cindy Bishop; and venture capitalist Tina Ju.

The focus on women addresses a glaring disparity. Less than 3% of global venture capital goes to women founders, said Khoueiry.

In the last three years, the programme has committed more than US$900,000 in grant money to 15 women-headed enterprises targeting 16 of the UN sustainable development goals.

Said Khoueiry: “When we launched the prize, we were very much focused on ‘how do you reach a woman that far in the grassroots so that you are able to educate her as well’. The application form that we have pulled together is structured to allow every applicant to learn from the process.” All applicants receive feedback.

What the finalists have in common is a “fire in the belly”, she added. “They have powerful ideas that are scalable and some of them, if not all, are creating a systemic change in their communities.”

Special mention went to South Korean former journalist Jieun Lee for her AI-powered platform connecting capital to non-profits outside of the 1% that receive 90% of yearly donations and a community craft market started by Thai Prangthong Tiengkate.

On the value of philanthropy to luxury firms, Khoueiry said: “As a private sector entity, it’s very important to keep philanthropy front and centre for our vision. It also attracts employees.

“Any person wanting to join a business today, they’re asking ‘What is your impact on the planet, on people? (This) gives purpose to our employees and helps retain talent.”

Sulfya Lim makes science and technology fun

Sulfya Lim knows how it feels to be a “bad” student. Born to an English-speaking family in Malaysia, she was made to take Chinese-language lessons for six years in primary school by her parents, who foresaw China’s ascent. Sometimes, she would copy out Chinese characters without understanding their meaning.

“I resisted it a lot because it was not my first language,” she told The Straits Times.

“But looking back now as an adult doing cross-border work and business with different communities, being able to speak Mandarin is one of the life skills that I appreciate my parents for giving me.”

As a child, though, her studies caused her chagrin. It is an experience that the 37-year-old is now attempting to dispel for students who are scared of or bored by STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects.

She co-founded GoTechUp in 2023, making robotics web games for primary to secondary school children that test their grasp of STEM fundamentals like distance, speed and, at more advanced levels, programming logic and how light-emitting diodes behave.

Players drag and drop instructions that control the path of a robot duck avatar. Missions become more difficult the closer a player gets to the final 115th stage, going from directing the robot in a straight line to tackling obstacles in a maze.

By her own admission, the game, built by Lim’s business partner, would have made her child self envious. “In some ways, I do wish that maybe instead of trudging through textbooks and having a (fixed) question-and-answer bank, perhaps we could have learnt through play.

“That’s the concept behind GoTechUp. We want to create joy in learning,” said Lim, who is married with no children.

A little over three years since its launch, the game has been played by some 8,000 children in eight countries, with the highest concentration in Malaysia.

Formerly a banker of 10 years, Lim took the long road to this second act in educational technology.

A search for meaning led her to volunteer with a reading programme for underserved children in the Covid-19 years, while she was still punching in at the bank.

One of the children she taught was a five-year-old boy who was a “pro at Roblox” (the Gen Alpha gaming platform) but a weak reader who could not stomach a book for more than five minutes.

By 2022, she was disillusioned with banking and quit her job to spend more time with her family. She ended up spending a full year teaching children at the reading programme centre, where she reunited with her former “pupil”, who had started reading on his own.

Seeing that transformation was proof of the effect that the right help, and foundation, can have on a child’s development, said Lim.

Meeting her co-founder, Ainaa Rosli, who was looking to transition from robotics hardware to software, was the final piece of the puzzle. “I’m human and I have only 24 hours (a day); I cannot be there all the time. So we chose to go with technology to help kids build those fundamental skills,” Lim added.

The next step is making the game inclusive for children of all abilities. GoTechUp updated the game with clearer visual cues after a deaf student quit playing because he could not make sense of the first level.

But Lim will need funding to build and integrate upgrades that cater to special education needs.

“When it comes to the learning curve, there’s a very precarious balance of skill and confidence, and when the game is not built to manage that, students will lose confidence and drop the entire subject,” she said.

This means building a better game for all learners, not just the differently abled, she added.

“We are the first-layer funnel for students to be interested in STEM and take that first step to try STEM-based activities. We want them to have that confidence even if they have no tech or coding background, to play a game that looks fun,” she said.

Mint Lim brings micro-schools to hard-to-reach children

When Mint Lim last spoke to ST in 2023, she was fresh from her appointment as the first Singaporean fellow of the Cartier Women’s Initiative, the French jeweller’s competitive social entrepreneurship programme.

Lim, the operator of inclusive learning centre School of Concepts (SOC), and who has dyslexia, said then that she aimed to reach one million children in total by 2025. She also hoped to open schools abroad.

Fast-forward to the present and SOC served 400,000 students in 2025 alone, spread over eight countries, including Kazakhstan.

The 39-year-old believes that breakthrough first million has been hit, if only through exposure to her proprietary diagnostic test. Developed over 10 years, it pins down a child’s learning style from three choices in one second.

It is a start, but Lim wants more. She told ST in China: “It’s a privilege to be in Singapore, where we have good-quality education everywhere. But as I tried to move (the schools) to the rest of the world, I realised that might not be the case in many other parts. When I looked deeper, I realised 272 million children are still out of school.

“How is that possible, right? How can I make education even more accessible?”

Enter Lim’s latest spin-off: School On Cloud. The software launched in May counters the biggest barriers to setting up shop on new ground – lack of expertise and teaching resources.

It provides training to would-be teachers and granular lesson plans based on School of Concepts’ methodology, fit for all three learner types – visual, data and storytelling, and experiential.

Individual progress reports, generated by AI, are sent to parents at the end of class detailing what the targeted pre-school and primary school-age children learnt that day. Subjects range from phonics and AI to robotics and financial literacy.

“With a system like this, it’s plug and play,” said Lim. Teachers need only provide the rudiments of a classroom, tables and chairs, to start running their own micro-schools.

The $8,000 software – subsidised from the $16,000 cost price – can also help the women earn a small livelihood, should they charge for lessons. Interested buyers are screened to ensure child safety.

Lim has been working on School On Cloud since the Covid-19 era, when global lockdowns made clear the limits of her bricks-and-mortar model. If learning was conditional on a child’s ability to be at a centre, she would bring the school to the child instead.

“From the simple phrase, ‘parents are the first educators of children’, we realised the educators are where the children are. If we empower the educator, we can empower the children,” she said.

So far, Lim’s portable school has had takers among women in Hanoi, Hong Kong, India and even Yishun in Singapore.

The modest Yishun spot was opened by a single mother who can now take her children to work with her. “It was a beautiful moment for me,” said Lim.

Once a serial for-profit entrepreneur, Lim’s zeal for accessible education is closely tied to her childhood struggles in the system. She still remembers flunking out of a Chinese-language course in primary school because her dyslexia made the character strokes unintelligible to her.

But she had a “village” behind her and scored well enough in her PSLE to go to Raffles Girls’ School, said Lim, who is married to a Singaporean construction executive. They have one daughter.

“If someone like me can learn, that means many other people can too,” she added.

They just need the right support. Lim has aimed to provide that since starting SOC in 2017, once teaching her Grab driver’s daughter at no charge after he mentioned that the seven-year-old girl could not speak English.

That little girl is now in secondary school, scooping up awards.

Said Lim: “This is how a child can be an agent of change. It was because the system and programme were available for her. That is my question now: ‘How can I make this programme accessible to more?’”