Powering the Future

Led by co‑founder and CEO Rusydi Khairul, Reactor School cultivates entrepreneurial mindsets, equipping youth with the skills and opportunities to tackle global challenges

- Nafeesa Saini.

The entrepreneurial climate in Singapore is flourishing like never before. According to the 2024 Global Startup Ecosystem Report by Startup Genome and the Global Entrepreneurship Network, the city has displaced Beijing as the top ecosystem for start‑ups in Asia. The numbers are staggering: Singapore is currently home to more than 4,500 tech start‑ups, 400 venture capital firms, and 240 accelerators, venture builders and incubators.

But this has not always been the case. This vibrant start‑up ecosystem is, in large part, thanks to accelerators and incubators such as Reactor School. Co‑founded by chief executive officer Rusydi Khairul in 2012, as a side project while he was still a chemistry and biological chemistry major at Nanyang Technological University, it is dedicated to nurturing next‑gen global founders under 30.

“I think the education system is broken,” says Rusydi, who eventually decided to run the school full‑time after a stint at Spring Singapore post‑graduation, where he worked on business excellence initiatives helping small and mid‑sized enterprises develop management systems to scale and grow. “A lot of students are good with pen‑and‑paper testing, but find it difficult to build something from scratch. Entrepreneurship education is a way to get students comfortable with uncertainty.”

Reactor School operates as an entrepreneurship ecosystem builder. “We help students turn their ideas into projects, and then their projects into companies. We work with high schools and universities to design entrepreneurship programmes, and collaborate with early‑stage venture capital funds to invest in start‑ups,” Rusydi explains. It now runs programmes in 17 cities across the Asia‑Pacific region.