Cool paint, clean power: These are the sustainable innovations that Temasek Foundation are backing for $2m, Singapore News

AsiaOne

22-05-2025

Imagine a Singapore where our buildings stay cool 24/7 without turning to air conditioning.
What if I told you we could also run entire industries where electricity is powered by hydrogen - a sustainable, clean energy source that primarily produces water as a by-product - as opposed to harmful greenhouse gases as we burn through fossil fuels?
Temasek Foundation has granted $2 million in catalytic support to turn these ideas into a reality for Singapore.
Earlier in May, eight finalists presented a case for their disruptive technologies to address the pressing environmental challenges that plague the world including Singapore: firstly, adopting decarbonisation strategies to minimise adverse impact on the environment, and second, creating a cooler earth where people and nature can thrive.
The winning teams were Krosslinker from Singapore, recognised for their energy-saving and cooling aerogel paints, and Ayrton Energy from Canada, whose technology makes it cheaper, easier and safer to transport hydrogen as a clean energy source.
We spoke to the winners of The Liveability Challenge 2025 to find out more about their journey to developing their innovations, and their plans to scale their impact with catalytic funding.
Dr Gayathri Natarajan, CEO of Krosslinker, grew up in Chennai in India, where temperatures are hot and humid all year long. Fifteen years ago, she moved to Singapore to complete her PhD in Chemical and Bio-molecular Engineering at National University of Singapore.
"I grew up in a region that's hotter than Singapore... I have always lived in hot regions," she said with a hearty laugh. This gave her an acute understanding of the real-world impact of urban heat and how not everyone can afford to beat it, with segments of society like construction workers having to toil in the relentless sun.
"For me, why you do something could be more important than what you do," she remarked.
Her lived experience, great passion for material sciences and chemical engineering, and her natural go-getter personality inspired Dr Gayathri to start Krosslinker, specialising in transformative aerogel technologies to deliver high impact solutions. Plans for cool paints to coat commercial buildings, data centres in Singapore
Krosslinker's winning solution of cooling aerogel paints responded to The Liveability Challenge's Cool Earth theme, as they presented a viable solution to heat mitigation with a pilot in Singapore as a global reference.
The product has already been tried and tested. In partnership with a leading insulation company in Abu Dhabi, the paint was put to test under extreme desert conditions. A storage container was coated with Krosslinker's proprietary aerogel paints, and measurements of the ambient and surface temperatures were taken. In contrast to the control containers, a maximum reduction of close to 30-degrees celsius in surface temperature was achieved with Krosslinker's paints.
Since their presentation and win at The Liveability Challenge, the Krosslinker team has garnered the attention of many commercial partners who have expressed interest in harnessing their transformative innovation.
"This is the best outreach we could have asked for," Dr Gayathari remarked, acknowledging the level of credibility and visibility of Temasek Foundation's backing has given their cause.
While the team expressed a keen interest in working to coat data centres, commercial buildings and even HDBs, they are assessing their current standing to see where they can deploy their resources to deliver the greatest impact for better liveability, sustainability and economic viability. 'Tackle the hard problems first'
When it comes to decarbonisation, sometimes progress means looking the other way - not in ignorance, but to explore alternative solutions. And that's exactly what the team at Ayrton Energy did.
"Our vision for the company is to see hydrogen achieve broad adoption," the team shared with an earnest belief that hydrogen energy could be adopted as the diesel of tomorrow.
Hydrogen is widely recognised as viable clean energy - so why aren't we all using it?
"The biggest challenge is getting hydrogen to site," Dr Brandy Kinkead, founder of Ayrton Energy presented as her opening note at The Liveability Challenge, detailing how its costs and logistical challenges have put up barriers to widespread adoption.
And while a great deal of investment and research has gone into hydrogen production, less attention has been paid to how hydrogen is stored and transported. Ayrton Energy's puts forth a product that addresses exactly that, looking to overcome the large barrier of hydrogen distribution and allow for lower cost, easy-to-manage hydrogen storage to transport globally.
As a company, Ayrton's philosophy is to "tackle the hard problems first", believing that their breakthrough has been propelled with a high-performance team and strong network of support from partners and funding providers. Different energy, same storage solutions
Ayrton Energy's proprietary carrier oils enable delivery of hydrogen using the same infrastructure as traditional fuel. At the site of hydrogen production, hydrogen is chemically bound to its carrier oil, with bound hydrogen transported and stored as a room temperature liquid, like how companies would typically transport diesel. At the site of hydrogen use, hydrogen is then safely released from the carrier.
With this technology, Ayrton enables a much simpler transportation process with no need for high-pressure tanks, cryogenic cooling, or specialised transport equipment, allowing industry partners looking to make the switch to more sustainable energy sources to do so seamlessly.
"Ayrton Energy is excited to support Singapore in their sustainability goals through providing cost-effective long duration and long-distance storage and transport of hydrogen," the team noted.
It plans to leverage on funding from The Liveability Challenge's to pilot its use in Singapore to deliver zero-emissions energy. The Liveability Challenge incubates ideas for impact
Now in its eighth edition, The Liveability Challenge presented by Temasek Foundation is a global sustainability innovation competition that allows for crowdsourcing of global innovations to benefit Singapore and the greater environment.
"We are excited about scaling impact and enabling mass adoption," commented Dr Gayathri on her team's win, hopeful that on top of delivering a sustainable solution, the product's economic incentive with projected energy savings will create a win-win situation for its partners.
"At Temasek Foundation, we believe in the urgency of supporting bold and deep-tech innovative solutions that can drive real progress in decarbonising our planet, and keeping our environment cool even with rising temperatures. Our catalytic funding reflects this important commitment - helping innovators move from promising innovations to operational prototypes with potential to scale," said Heng Li Lang, Head of Climate and Liveability at Temasek Foundation.
Past winners of the challenge included Equatic, which sought to build the world's largest ocean-based carbon removal plant in Singapore, as well as CricketOne, which addressed food resilience through a low-carbon, crickets-based protein for human consumption.
READ MORE: 'Anyone who has eaten today should care about the food that we're eating': Climate changemakers delve into disruptive solutions for food security and carbon emissions in Singapore
This article is brought to you in partnership with Temasek Foundation.
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