Singapore grocery startup honestbee collapsed into liquidation in 2020 owing S$319.9 million, after co-founder and CEO Joel Sng was ousted over lavish spending of company funds, including a Japanese property and payments to his own shell companies.
Founded in 2015 by Joel Sng, Isaac Tay and Jonathan Low, honestbee rode the on-demand boom, offering grocery, food and laundry delivery across eight Asian markets including Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia and Japan. In 2018 it opened Habitat, a tech-enabled flagship supermarket and dining hall touted as the company's crowning jewel. Backed by venture capital from Asia and the US, it looked like Singapore's next breakout startup.
The unraveling began in early 2019. The company halted its food delivery and laundry services in Singapore in May, affecting some 400 part-time delivery workers, and shuttered operations across the region. That same month Sng departed as CEO, replaced first by cornerstone investor Brian Koo of Formation 8 and then by Ong Lay Ann, as a strategic review laid bare the scale of the financial hole.
Investigations into the company's books revealed that Sng had treated company funds as his own. He bought a property in Japan worth about US$1.1 million, rented apartments in multiple cities, and set up several shell companies that honestbee then paid for products, all without declaring the transactions to investors. The company had racked up more than S$180 million in debt under his leadership, and liquidators later put total claims at S$319.9 million owed to former staff, vendors and creditors. Sng himself was later made a bankrupt by the Singapore courts.
Attempts at resuscitation, including a debt moratorium and turnaround plans, failed, and honestbee was placed under liquidation in July 2020. Its story joined Terraform Labs and Zilingo in the pantheon of high-profile Singapore startup implosions attributed to founder hubris and poor governance, and became a cautionary tale for investors about the cost of trusting charismatic founders without checking the books.
The honestbee debacle became shorthand in Southeast Asia's startup scene for founder excess. Industry post-mortems pointed to a familiar pattern: a charismatic chief executive, dazzled investors, and a board that failed to ask hard questions until the money was gone. Brian Koo, the investor who stepped in after Sng's ouster, inherited the painful task of untangling the finances. For Singapore's ambition to be a startup hub, the lesson was blunt: governance matters as much as growth, and due diligence cannot be outsourced to trust.