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GOH Aik Chuan has always dreamt of being his own boss.

But in pragmatic Singapore, it was a path he dismissed as a pipe dream. For most of his twenties, he was busy climbing the corporate ladder – first as an analyst at UBS Group, then as an operations manager at Uber.

In 2019, while pursuing his Master of Business Administration (MBA) at Insead Singapore, he came across the concept of a “search fund”: an investment vehicle through which a budding entrepreneur raises capital from investors to find, acquire, and eventually run a small business.

This time, the idea stayed with him, even as he advanced his career at consulting giant McKinsey & Co and, later, an education technology company.

In April 2024, he took the plunge and launched Garlic Equity Capital – Singapore’s first traditional search fund – after raising S$500,000 in search capital from 19 institutional and private investors locally and overseas.