The 5-star Raffles Hotel in Boston was a fitting location for the launch of Singapore’s fifth international hub in the U.S., as the original site of the international hotel chain opened in Singapore nearly 140 years ago.
Officials rubbed shoulders with business leaders in a 19th-floor meeting room on Wednesday evening to celebrate the launch of Singapore’s newest Overseas Centre and announced the first agreement signed between the Singapore government and a U.S. state to promote mutual economic growth.
In between lobster, summer rolls, shrimp and curry puffs, guests sipped bright pink, gin-based Singapore Slings, cocktails invented at the original Raffles Hotel in 1915.
Singapore has already established Overseas Centres in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Austin. The Boston outpost is located in Kendall Square in Cambridge and has been operating for nearly a year, but the gathering this week celebrated the growing economic ties between Boston and the Southeast Asian city-state.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu attended the event and was bullish on the partnership. The Kendall Square hub “will be their best American office very soon,” Wu said in a speech. “We are not the city of champions for any small reason.”
Like all of Singapore's U.S. hubs, the latest site is overseen by Enterprise Singapore (EnterpriseSG), which operates under Singapore's Ministry of Trade and Industry.
Trade between Singapore and Massachusetts more than doubled between 2021 and 2025 to reach $2.75 billion in 2025, according to EnterpriseSG. The Boston Overseas Centre is designed to connect Singapore businesses with market insights, access to projects, connections to local corporations and capital networks.
The hub follows EnterpriseSG’s first state-level partnership in the U.S., which was signed earlier in the day with the Massachusetts Office of International Trade and Investment, strengthening the connection between Singapore and Massachusetts-based businesses in the life sciences, energy, advanced manufacturing, robotics and AI.
The biopharma industry will be a focus of the new hub, Lim Seow Hui, director of EnterpriseSG's Americas Division, told Fierce.
“The hub will naturally focus on some of the key sectors of interest from Singapore companies, namely life science and biotech,” Lim said. “Our work in the United States is about building this relationship in the market and forming partnerships with VCs, ecosystem partners, U.S. firms and corporations, so that we open up pathways and doors to Singapore companies and Singapore companies can come here to partner with U.S. firms to develop the solutions and the products.”
EnterpriseSG will work to connect Boston VC funders with Singapore companies, leveraging the expertise and strength of the local biotech industry in hopes of supporting Singapore’s growth in the sector, Lim said. She name-checked Polaris Partners and MPM BioImpact as investment firms with a presence in Singapore already.
“VCs from Massachusetts in the biotech scene may want to tech scout, do portfolio management or even hunt for good deals in Asia through Singapore,” Lim suggested.
For decades, the country has been looking to grow its biopharma scene, as the government made biomedical research the “fourth pillar” of the city-state’s economy back in 2000. Singapore has yet to find its unicorn; the once-promising cell therapy biotech Tessa Therapeutics shut down in 2023 after some mixed trial data despite raising $200 million, which dwarfed other Singapore biotech funding at the time.
More bad news came in April, when BioNTech announced it would be shutting down its Singapore plant and planned regional headquarters it purchased from Novartis by February 2027.
There have been positive stories, including from Singapore-based drug discovery platform Nanyang Biologics, which is making its way to the Nasdaq via a special purpose acquisition company merger.
Others are already benefiting from the new Singapore-Boston connection. Preclinical biotech Cirrus Therapeutics, which is developing gene therapies for age-related macular degeneration and other chronic blinding diseases, has a footprint in both Singapore and Boston.
“We love the synergy between these two sites,” Cirrus CEO Ying Kai Chan told Fierce. “Especially the concentration of scientific talent, clinical talent, as well as drug development talent. Our team is about half and half between the two sites, and we have worked synergistically to take these therapies to patients.”
Cirrus was working with the hub prior to the official opening to connect with organizations in Singapore in order to navigate clinical trials, including connecting with top hospitals and potential investigators.
“They've help[ed] create connections, ideas, and we think that this is going to be something that will give us a leg up,” Chan said.
At the event, EnterpriseSG’s Managing Director Cindy Khoo noted that Singapore-based VC firm Vertex Holdings—no connection to the biopharma with the same name—has already invested $100 million in nine Massachusetts startups, including Waltham-based CDMO ElevateBio.
“As the first Southeast Asian country to establish a trade office in Massachusetts, we're committed to strengthening linkages between Massachusetts and Singapore, and we are also excited to play a bridging role between Massachusetts with the opportunities, growth and talent that the broader Southeast Asia region has to offer,” Khoo said.
Massachusetts Secretary of the Executive Office of Economic Development Eric Paley, who was also in attendance, told attendees that the state could learn from the way Singapore looks globally to grow its economy.
“Both are not particularly big places, but we punch massively above our weight class,” Paley said. “How do we do it? We rely on talent. We rely on people. We rely on innovation, and these are shared values.”
According to a ranking from the Financial Times and Nikkei, Boston is already the top city in the U.S. for foreign multinational businesses.
During the event, Mayor Wu described how Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere’s daughter Maria lived in Singapore because her husband was appointed as the first American consul to the region. Maria’s family owned a foundry in Boston that made bells that are now prized antiques, and she commissioned one to be built for a church in Singapore. It is now the only Revere bell to reside outside the U.S.
In a speech, Wu drew a connection between the ringing of the bell and the new partnership.
“Today we continue to bring that call for partnership, and the partnership we're celebrating is forged from that centuries-old bond, our shared belief that we can and should innovate for our people,” the mayor said.