In fact, the entire tech industry was struggling then, still reeling from the March 2000 dotcom crash, which vaporised internet companies and early-stage digital ventures after years of speculative excess.
Goh was convinced HungryGo-Where had a genuine business proposition. The website, he envisioned, would make it easy for diners to discover and review restaurants online while enabling eateries to gain digital visibility in a market where reliable, searchable food information was scarce.
After plenty of elbow grease and rejection by F&B establishments, HungryGoWhere not only claimed its spot in Singapore but also went on to stake a digital foothold in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Vietnam and Australia. The online food guide eventually caught the eye of Singapore Telecommunications, which bought it out in 2012 for $12 million.
More than a decade later, Goh, a Public Service Commission overseas merit scholar, finds himself drawn once again to territory few have contemplated. This time around, it’s Singapore’s maritime industry, where he sees a huge divide between companies in the upper echelons and the rest of the ecosystem.
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His affinity with maritime is in part inherent. His grandfather, Goh Koh Pui, was the first local chairman of the Port of Singapore Authority. “I grew up with maritime,” Goh, 50, tells The Edge Singapore.
Maritime bugbears
Singapore is one of the world’s most advanced maritime hubs. Container terminals here are among the most automated globally, with driverless vehicles and computer-controlled yard cranes a common sight.
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Beyond that, however, much of the wider maritime ecosystem — ship repair, marine logistics, port clearance and documentation — still relies a lot on human labour and paper-based workflows.
The prevalence of manual work stems largely from physical and operational constraints. Ship repair and inspection, for instance, take place in confined or underwater spaces that are difficult for robots to navigate. Tasks such as welding, coating and retrofitting require dexterity and flexibility, which automation technologies cannot replicate easily.
Meanwhile, documentation and clearance processes remain fragmented across agencies. A single vessel call can involve multiple certificates submitted to various authorities, often in varying formats. Without common data standards and integrated systems, digitalisation efforts struggle to achieve scale.
Economic considerations also slow automation. Operating on thin margins, many smaller shipyards and marine suppliers cannot justify the high upfront costs of robotic systems or AI platforms.
Also, access to bank financing — for business growth, let alone automation efforts — has become far more restrictive due to tougher Basel rules. Introduced in the wake of the global financial crisis, these global banking standards set capital, liquidity and leverage requirements to ensure prudent risk management. In effect, they have made ship financing less economical for banks, leading to reduced appetite for maritime exposure.
Workforce habits and skill gaps add to the challenge: much of the operational knowledge lies with experienced technicians and ship agents accustomed to manual methods, and training or workflow redesign takes time.
Taken together, these issues have given rise to a two-speed maritime industry: cutting-edge automation at government-backed major terminals, and largely manual operations among smaller firms, many of which find it hard to modernise or grow much more due to funding constraints.
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Enter Salt Investments
For Goh, a self-styled “civil servant at heart”, small and medium maritime enterprises need more help in getting access to financing and in becoming more productive through automation and digitisation.
That conviction drew him to Salt Investments, formerly known as Jasper Investments, which he joined as an independent director in 2022 before becoming CEO in June last year.
While far removed from the world of restaurant reviews, his current role in Salt is aligned with his post-civil service career in venture capital and as co-founder of Lyte Ventures, a fintech group licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
In business since 2017, Lyte has a proprietary credit underwriting engine that automates how financial institutions decide whether to approve a loan, how much to lend, and how risky it is. Its AI-powered platform de-risks commission-based workers and freelancers by analysing their real, recurring income before advancing earnings.
Using actual income data instead of traditional loan metrics allows Lyte to safely serve workers banks often avoid. Its credit underwriting engine has tracked over $1 billion in income flows and underwritten some $200 million in advances for real estate agents and freelance workers in Singapore.
The same can be done for maritime companies, according to Goh. “I learned this from the insurance industry. The masters of de-risking are the insurance industry.” Insurers safeguard themselves and their customers through risk-pooling, and the same principle can be applied to the thousands of maritime companies here, which collectively employ more than 170,000 workers, he figures.
“Banks hesitate to go downstream to the rest of the companies in the maritime sector because it’s risky. Individually, these companies may be risky. But imagine if I build a whole ecosystem where banks end up not taking the risks associated with each company. Instead, these risks are mitigated by my platform,” says Goh.
Reshaping maritime finance
Leveraging Lyte’s technology, Salt plans to reshape maritime finance by introducing data-driven credit solutions tailored for SMEs. Its financing platform will use AI-enabled valuation, automated underwriting and real-time risk monitoring to support products such as invoice and inventory financing, helping firms unlock liquidity tied up in receivables or stock.
The aim is to ease companies’ cash-flow constraints and reduce reliance on bank lending. A digital finance exchange to link maritime companies with alternative lenders may also be in the works.
Complementing this will be a digital payments platform that supports secure B2B and B2C transactions. This entails automating invoicing and payroll, managing multi-currency and cross-border flows, and promoting financial inclusion for contract or freelance workers through timely disbursements and earned wage access. Automated know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering checks will be built in.
To anchor both financing and payments, Salt will build a unified B2B infrastructure platform that acts as the maritime sector’s digital backbone, integrating invoicing, financing, identity verification, job tracking and workflow automation. The aim is to have an interoperable system that cuts administrative work, improves transparency and helps maritime businesses operate more efficiently.
The way Goh sees it, helping smaller maritime firms reduce paperwork and bottlenecks will make them more competitive and bankable.
“In order to transform the industry and unlock the benefits, you cannot just go in as a normal technology provider. You got to come up with a showcase of an ecosystem and show them that it works,” he says. “If you can build from the bottom-up, connect the whole supply chain and overlay that with the funding solutions, that will be transformative.”
Go-to-market strategy
Some of these services will be launched within the next few quarters, according to Goh. Salt’s go-to-market strategy hinges on its two subsidiaries. It bought a 51% stake in Prosper Excel Engineering, a marine engineering firm, in November last year, and a 60% interest in TT Oil, which supplies marine fuels and lubricants, in June this year.
Prosper Excel’s services include vessel management, ship building and repair, oil-waste recycling, and tank cleaning. In business since 2015, it counts oil majors, national oil companies, and vessel owners and operators among its clients. TT Oil, incorporated in 2016, supplies to some of the top 20 oil and gas companies worldwide. The two Singapore-based subsidiaries are profitable.
For a start, Salt will automate Prosper Excel and TT Oil’s operations using Lyte’s AI tools. It will then tap both companies’ industry ties to bring the same solutions to other maritime firms.
Doing so allows Salt to bypass long onboarding cycles common in enterprise software and avoid high customer-acquisition costs. This gives Salt a ready ecosystem of operators, vendors and SMEs whose transactions and data can be integrated to improve risk assessment, expand the financing pool and offer more affordable credit to firms struggling to get bank loans.
“I’ll be connecting all the flows and partners. This will be my natural go-to-market distribution channel,” says Goh. “I believe once I showcase this, everyone’s going to sit up and say ‘That is a very interesting way of de-risking’.” No one else has done what Salt is attempting for Singapore’s maritime sector, he points out.
“I don’t dare to call it a super app because nowadays a lot of people have misused the word when actually all they have is just an app. Let me build a useful suite of services first. When everyone is using the services, naturally I’ll end up with a super app because it’s validated.”
Salt’s push appears timely: US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on most of the world are redirecting more cargo through Singapore, a major global transshipment hub.
Once tested and proven, Salt’s business model can be replicated in other countries, with Malaysia being the most natural choice, he adds. A meaningful portion of Singapore’s maritime traffic flows to or from Malaysia, as many carriers routinely pair the two ports in their regional networks.
Salt’s financial year ends on March 31. While it prepares to launch its automation and credit-risk assessment solutions, Prosper Excel and TT Oil will drive the group’s revenue with their existing services.
For its last financial year, Salt booked revenue — a modest $2.1 million — for the first time in six years, thanks to Prosper Excel. With TT Oil, Salt’s overall revenue for its first half ended Sept 30 came in at $9.2 million.
Salt is still in the red but expects to do much better by the time its current financial year ends. If anything, none of the prominent high-net-worth individuals who became shareholders of Salt last year has questioned its pace of progress, Goh lets on.
The company raised over $22 million last year from an equity cash call that attracted more than a dozen individual investors. Among them were Koh Boon Hwee, board member of sovereign wealth fund GIC and chairman of the Singapore Exchange; Tan Chin Hwee, former CEO of Trafigura Asia-Pacific; and Andrew Yeo, CEO of Income Insurance.
“A lot of these esteemed corporate personalities backed me at Lyte way back when it started. They are all long-term investors. They understand the vision, and vision takes time to execute. It’s the same with Salt,” says Goh.
“What we’ve done so far last year and this year is laying the foundation. I know the market is always impatient, but in the coming quarters, I’m going to be announcing many more things.
“What I’m doing in the maritime sector is actually not the path of least resistance. But if we can crack it, we will be more than a normal money-making business. Because we can create so much value, we will end up being in a very dominant position over time.”
Goh’s ambition may appear abstract for some, but the bet is straightforward: show that automated underwriting, shared data and workflow digitisation can make smaller maritime firms bankable, and Salt secures a foothold in a sector long resistant to change. If the model proves scalable, Salt won’t just add a new revenue stream. It could well reshape how Singapore’s maritime ecosystem is financed and run.
