My story — from factory floor to founder

Vasanth Sreeram (born 4 June 2000), also known as Vas, is a Singapore-based entrepreneur, engineer, and AI builder. This is not a polished founder myth. It is the path that made the work make sense: poverty and displacement, undiagnosed ADHD, academic near-misses, National Service friction, failed first ventures, and a stubborn pattern that still holds — I do better when the stakes are high and there is almost no slack.

Early life: survival first

I was born in Nagercoil (Nagarkoil), Kanyakumari district, Tamil Nadu. Very early, my family was pushed out of our extended family home. For a stretch we lived temporarily in a friend's factory office — not as a cute "humble beginnings" line, but as the actual floor plan of childhood.

With almost nothing left, my father made the hard call in 2003–2004 to move to Singapore alone as a construction labourer, earning around S$300 a month. Every dollar went home. The family sold gold, mortgaged what we could, and ran on extreme frugality. My grandfather would walk kilometres just to bring snacks — small acts that still land harder than any speech about grit.

Even then the family stayed strangely optimistic. They took large loans, bought land, and built a first proper house around 2004. In 2005 my younger brother was born. For a moment, life felt less like pure survival.

Singapore, 2010: "better" was still brutal

At nine or ten, we finally joined my father in Singapore. The upgrade was real and still merciless. I waited months just to enter school. My English and academics were weak enough that authorities wanted me in Primary 3 instead of Primary 5. My parents begged the vice-principal and got Primary 4.

The early commute from Jurong West to Jiuying Primary was about two hours each way. Wake at 5 a.m. Bus and MRT alone. Later I moved to Pioneer Primary, closer to home. I was severely bullied — mostly by other Indian students — while Chinese classmates were often kinder. Undiagnosed ADHD kept me near the bottom of the class.

The academic grind and the first unlock

PSLE still stings in the memory. I topped my class in prelims (2nd overall) and then flopped the actual exam with 183, landing in Normal Academic. My dad refused the "easier" path and pushed me into Fuhua Secondary.

As an NA student I felt locked out of the better parts of school life. Then Secondary 3 hit as the first true turning point. PE teacher and NPCC officer Mr Hilmy let me join National Police Cadet Corps late, starting at the lowest rank: Private.

Structure, daily training, and pressure did something academics alone never did. Maths and science jumped. A pattern showed up that I still use as a personal operating system:

I perform much better when I have no break and life is stressful.

I stayed an extra year (Sec 5) after missing the Polytechnic Foundation Programme by one point. For O-levels I downgraded to a dumb phone, drilled English every day, stopped tuition, and scored mostly A's. Out of that entire Sec 5 cohort, only two students made Junior College. I was one of them.

Junior College: barely in, then president

At Jurong Pioneer Junior College, a vice-principal who backed NPCC saw my background and some coding experience and let me take Computing, Physics, and H2 Mathematics — even without Additional Mathematics. That meant self-teaching roughly three years of Add Math on top of the JC load.

I joined the Current Affairs Society even though I disliked politics, and ended up as its president. JC2 was dangerous in the opposite way: too much free time. With A-levels close, I locked in for about a month at extreme intensity and finished with 68.75 rank points. Not a fairy-tale score. Enough. Hard-won.

NS, first failure, then real companies

National Service came next. I am not going to dress that up; I hated it.

Right after NS I started TeachX, a tuition platform. It failed because we could not sell or scale. The failure was expensive emotionally and useful forever.

What followed was not one clean pivot but parallel building:

• BugBoom — circular-economy work using black soldier fly larvae to turn food waste into feed and fertiliser
• Noverse Inc. — edtech for AI grading; I operate as CTO / lead engineer
• Lint / Lintlabs (Lint Technologies) — applied AI lab and services for SMEs: agents, voice, process automation

All of that while studying Bioengineering at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). University was also where ADHD finally got a name.

Family as the real case study

The strongest model in my life is still my father. Secondary-school dropout. Low-wage construction worker. Climbed into management, then left to build his own company. Today he runs Renu Eng Consultant, an NDT services group that grew through acquisition and grind — not LinkedIn poetry.

That background is why I treat shipping as respect. Theory without the bench is incomplete.

How I work now

I build games, apps, bots, websites, models, and open-source pieces while juggling companies and school. I am biased toward systems that remove busywork, agents that actually complete loops, and products that survive contact with messy reality.

This site is the personal layer of that: the long story and shorter notes consolidated into Writing.

Late bloomers, builders, and neurodivergent minds can rewrite the script — but usually only after they stop waiting for ideal conditions.