Dr. Loretta Chen makes Top 10 Female Founder at the UBS Female Founder Award 2023

Smobler announced that its co-founder and CEO, Loretta Chen, had been recognised as a Top 10 female founder in the UBS Female Founder Award 2023, for leadership and innovation in the metaverse.

Now in its third year, the award honours female start-up founders and C-suite executives in fintech and enterprise tech. It exists to address the funding gap a 2021 UBS report identified — the case being that equal opportunity for female entrepreneurs is an economic argument, not only a fairness one.

“This recognition is humbling and a real honor,” said Chen. “My fellow founders are all incredible in their own right working in fields as diverse as empowering rural women in India to providing financing to African communities. At Smobler, we seek to enable digital asset creation, ownership and financial empowerment through gamification and the open Metaverse.”

Smobler’s three business pillars at the time were metaverse development, phygital creation and blockchain solutions, behind a run of world-firsts: a metaverse wedding, the Tools of Rock concert venue, and a disability park with SG Enable, Singapore’s focal agency for disability. It also led the first cross-chain project with Clay Nation, the leading project on Cardano.

The studio is backed by Brinc and The Sandbox, and supported by UBS, IMDA, Enterprise Singapore, Plug and Play, German Entrepreneurship and AWS.