Moderator

Maria Teo

Associate Director, Sustainability and Climate Change Lead

CLA Global TS Risk Advisory

Chairperson, ISCA Young Professionals Advisory Committee

Member, ISCA Sustainability and Climate Change Committee

Maria has over ten years of experience in assurance, compliance and other advisory work. She now specialises in sustainability and risk advisory, and data governance implementation and compliance over areas such as GDPR and PDPA. She assists various listed companies in Singapore, spanning various industries, to comply with and improve their sustainability reporting programme.

Maria’s clients include listed companies, multinational companies and statutory boards and cover statutory audits and other certification exercises. Her industry experience consists of manufacturing, shipping, trading and retail and she also has experience in initial public offering exercises, financial due diligence and forensic accounting engagements.

Maria has led and conducted several sustainability engagements, including TCFD implementation, capacity building workshops and trainings on sustainability-related topics and facilitating clients in their sustainability journey on aspects such as materiality assessment, stakeholder engagement and reporting.

Panellists

Jolene Lum

Advisor

Cento Ventures

Jolene Lum is a seasoned entrepreneur turned investor. She was an active Venture Builder and spun out 3 ventures in the Agrifood Industry, including being the operating Founder and Group CEO of Urban Tiller, a full-stack urban agriculture supply chain business where she worked with farmers on improving their farming methods and technologies coupled with a quick commerce supply chain to restaurants and consumers within 8-hours of harvest- operating across Singapore and Hyderabad, India, having raised a pre-seed round.

 She also assisted with the founding operations of Mycovation, Asia's first mycelium-ingredients platform, including building up a pilot-lab for fermentation operations and raising its seed funding round; and was the operating co-founder of Feedwerkz- a Black Soldier Fly protein platform for sustainable animal feed across a farm in Singapore and Indonesia.

Subsequently, Jolene was a founding executive of Nurasa (f.k.a Asia Sustainable Foods Platform)- a wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek in Singapore, contributing to build a pilot-scale Food Tech Innovation Centre in Biopolis, Singapore spanning 4000sqm of new food-grade lab space.

She was Head of Business Development and contributed to helping food companies scale-up across Asia using their pilot and joint venture scale-up facilities in Precision Fermentation and High-Moisture Extrusion, ecosystem building and management for scale-up partnerships internationally, and was part of investment deals in Agrifood and managing existing portfolio investments including.

Jolene is now an Investor at Cento Ventures focused on Southeast Asia investments, and supporting portfolio growth of companies that aim to transform the digital landscape in Southeast Asia.

Amanda Poo