Oliver Tan has said he was away on business when Lee Kuan Yew died, and that he cried at a memorial service in San Francisco, far from home. It is a small detail, but it explains a lot about a man who would spend a decade selling Singapore-made artificial intelligence to the world.
Tan did not come from a laboratory. He took an MBA at Royal Holloway, University of London, and worked on the business side of media and internet companies: business development at e-Cop, later Quann, and at Pacific Internet, and then a spell as managing director of MNC Media in Indonesia. He was the person who knew how to sell. What he needed was something to sell.
A shopper sees a handbag, snaps it, and the retailer's site shows her something she can buy.
It came out of a university. In 2012, researchers at the NUS-Tsinghua NExT centre, among them professor Chua Tat-Seng and Li Guangda, had built technology that could look at a picture and find similar things. Tan joined with Roger Yuen, who became chairman, and the four of them started ViSenze. The founders put in the first money themselves.
The pitch was concrete. A shopper sees a handbag, snaps it, and the retailer's site shows her something she can buy. In 2014 Rakuten Ventures led a US$3.5 million Series A. Two years later came US$10.5 million more.
What almost nobody saw was the awkward part of being the front man. Tan has said that when he pitched to customers and investors in China, his partners discovered his Mandarin was not as strong as they had assumed. The company's biggest buyers and a good share of its ideas lived in Chinese-speaking markets, and its salesman was working in a second language he had overestimated. He laughs about it in interviews now. He has also said he used to work so hard he forgot to eat.
The turn was the 2019 Series C of US$20 million, co-led by Gobi Partners and Sonae IM, which took total funding to about US$34.5 million. By then ViSenze was selling to retailers and smartphone makers, and Tan was describing the best moment of his startup life as the day investors committed money: in his words, "Let's go make it come true!!!"
The price of staying independent in visual search was steep. Google, Amazon and Pinterest were all building the same thing for free. In 2025, reports say, ViSenze was acquired by Rezolve AI, and Tan went on to lead Rezolve's Asia-Pacific business.
The lesson is in his own advice: do not chase the most original idea, he has said, aim to be much better than the original. A university can give you the science. It cannot tell you that your pitch has a language problem, and it takes a founder honest enough to say so.