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About Griffin Labs

Robots that work where automation never could.

Griffin Labs started in 2025 to deploy intelligent machines in Southeast Asian facilities: hotels, airports, commercial buildings. We train the AI, build the robots, and run the operations.

Our thesis

Why this problem.

A structural labour shortage

Singapore's cleaning workforce is aging faster than new workers enter it. Southeast Asia and Europe face the same shift. The cause is demographic: fewer people will do this work, and demand for well-maintained commercial space keeps growing.

Operators want to automate. The tools they can buy have not worked in the environments they manage. Griffin gives these operators machines that share the load.

No longer hardware-limited

Mobility platforms and sensor arrays can now execute the physical tasks facilities require. The hardware moves, reaches, and senses.

These machines still cannot perceive a new situation and act without explicit programming. Rooms vary. Shifts change. Intelligence is the bottleneck.

The AI-limited era

Foundation models give physical systems two capabilities they lacked: reasoning from language and generalizing from limited examples.

The remaining challenge is grounding: training models that connect perception to action and adapt based on live sensor data.

Griffin Labs exists for this work. We train embodied AI on data from live facilities and build the robotic systems that run those models. Each deployment feeds training data back into the next.

Why now

Physical AI is an engineering problem now.

Hardware and foundation models have reached the point where deployment data is the binding constraint. Griffin owns the full stack: we operate in live environments and feed field data back into training.

Founded

2025, Singapore

Stage

Building & deploying

Focus

Facilities management, Southeast Asia

Team

Who we are.

Raphael Yee

Co-founder · CEO

Previously software engineer at Carousell, where he worked across data, AI/ML, and backend systems at scale for 10M+ MAU. Started Griffin Labs within LionsBot in early 2025.

Dr Soujanya Poria

Co-founder · Chief AI Officer

Associate Professor at NTU. Globally recognized expert in VLA models. President's Young Scientist and MIT TR35 Innovator. 40,000+ citations.

Advisors

Victor Neo

First employee at Carousell, served as Director of Engineering and scaled the platform to unicorn status.

Dr Mohan Rajesh Elara

Provost's Chair Professor at SUTD, LionsBot co-founder. One of the world's top reconfigurable robotics researchers.

Build what comes next.

We are hiring researchers and engineers to work on embodied AI in Singapore, on real robots in real deployments.