About a year ago, Carousell co-founder Lucas Ngoo announced that he would be stepping down from the company’s day-to-day operations, citing personal reasons for his departure.
He also announced his desire to explore new areas of innovation and deepen his understanding of other industries, including artificial intelligence (AI).
Now, it seems like the entrepreneur’s ambitions in AI are taking flight.
In a LinkedIn post about a week ago, Ngoo revealed his two latest startups: Caresense.ai, a personal health assistant, as well as an unnamed startup that aims to train robots to help with daily tasks in manufacturing industries.
Here’s what we know so far about the Carousell co-founder’s latest enterprises.
An AI-powered digital health assistant
Through CareSense.ai, Ngoo aims to create a platform that leverages AI to provide personalised health coaching.
At the core of this effort is Mandy, an AI-powered digital companion that users can access via the Caresense.ai app or directly through WhatsApp integration.
Mandy concentrates on what Ngoo called the “four pillars of lifestyle behaviour,” namely sleep, stress, diet, and exercise.
A lot of diseases can be prevented if you just take care of your diet, take care of your exercise, sleep, and your stress… And a lot of these things are behavioural changes. That’s where AI can come in.
Lucas Ngoo in an interview with TechInAsia
Users can opt to link the Caresense.ai app with Apple Health or Google Fit to track their lifestyle habits.
Among other features, they can also send pictures of their food for nutritional analysis or snap a photograph of their treadmill display to log a workout, saving them the hassle of manually calculating their caloric changes.
Ngoo said that there has been progress in his new company, where paying-enterprise clients like Singapore-based Surbana Jurong group were among his first few customers.
For corporate customers, CareSense.ai also offers a subscription model, bundling Mandy with corporate health screening packages.
Currently, Ngoo shared that the AI health startup is “in the process of raising a seed round.” He plans to utilise the capital to expand his team, which brings together AI engineers and healthcare professionals, including health coaches and cardiologists.
Ngoo also talked of future plans to scale its user acquisition efforts and expand into new Southeast Asian markets such as Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong.
The company’s first priority, though, is to work closely with companies to scale and improve their wellness programmes.
AI in robotics
Ngoo’s second startup, which focuses on the field of general-purpose robotics, is still in the making.
While he did not reveal many details, he shared that his vision for the startup is not to reinvent robotic hardware from scratch, but to create “a general-purpose [AI] model that you can put into a robot”.
This, he claimed, would allow businesses to teach humanoid robots new tasks without massive reinvestment.
Ngoo aims to implement this solution across warehouses, logistics, and manufacturing to help with real-world tasks, starting in Southeast Asia.
Although just about a month old at the time of writing, the startup is already incorporated and has begun training its foundational models.
According to Ngoo, the company’s immediate priority is now is “to build our first use case […] have a model that we collect data, we fine-tune, we put into a robot, and then we can solve a task.”
“It’s still early—lots to build and learn—but I’m excited about what’s ahead.”
Addressing pressing issues with AI
13 years ago, Ngoo founded Carousell together with his friends, Marcus Tan and Quek Siu Rui. The company maintains a strong presence across seven markets through its brands—Carousell, Cho Tot, Laku6, Mudah.my, OneShift, and Refash—reportedly serving tens of millions of active users.
Ngoo initially led and developed Carousell’s Tech function, before collaborating with various business and engineering teams across the Carousell Group to pilot recommerce initiatives and establish the company’s automotive recommerce business in Malaysia.
In an interview with TechinAsia, Ngoo said that when he and his co-founders started the company in 2011, many firms were looking for areas where tech could fill existing gaps. He cited Apple’s iPhone as an example—it was the first cellular phone that let users do more than call and text.
The founder sees similar potential with AI, which he believes can address pressing issues like labour shortages for dangerous or mundane jobs, or the advanced age of the workers in these roles.
After running Carousell for over a decade, Ngoo believes he’s now ready to pursue missions where AI can “truly change lives” through his two new startups in healthcare and robotics.
He shared that his experience has better equipped him to recognise and address the evolving needs of a startup at each stage. His background, he believes, also positions him to manage the demands of running two ventures simultaneously—though there are those who question whether he is taking on too much at once.
In addition, healthtech and robotics are also vastly different from Carousell’s core business. It remains to be seen whether Ngoo’s experience in building a marketplace platform will translate to success in these new ventures.
- Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean startups here.
Featured Image Credit: Quest Ventures, CareSense.ai
