Arjun Thomas —
Founder & Venture
Strategist.
Based in Singapore, helping early-stage founders and innovation teams across APAC cross the valley of death — from a product that works to customers who actually pay and renew. Founder of Arc Shift Ventures and host of the Building Real podcast.
Founder & Venture Strategist
Arjun Thomas is a Founder & Venture Strategist based in Singapore, helping early-stage founders and innovation teams across APAC cross the hardest stretch of company-building: the valley of death between a product that works and customers who actually pay and renew. He is the founder of Arc Shift Ventures (ArcShift) and the host of the Building Real podcast.
Over 18+ years and 11 markets, Arjun has lived both sides of the problem most operators only see one of — building products that work, and building the commercial motion that makes people pay for them. He has co-founded three ventures (Funzi, ComeBy, and Alara Studio), led three corporate spin-outs in parallel, and supported more than 100 founders.
Track record
At Nokia, Arjun scaled the Nokia Life mobile information service to ~125M people across 21 markets. At Funzi (co-founded), he reached 8–10M+ learners across 17+ countries with partners including Pearson, the UN, and Google. At ComeBy — an AI retail-analytics company spun out of Wright Partners — he grew to US$400K ACV across 90+ brands and 20+ countries, serving 1.7M+ shoppers a month and raising over US$1M. At Wright Partners he ran three simultaneous corporate venture builds (Standard Chartered, Olam, Maxis). At CLEAR Global, his multilingual AI assistants earned a 90.1% trust rating.
What Arjun does at ArcShift
Through ArcShift Ventures, Arjun helps founders move from idea, pilot, or early traction to real commercial momentum in APAC. His sharpest edge is APAC go-to-market across 11 markets.
Validate
Customer discovery, problem validation, and PMF signals — confirming who truly needs this before scaling spend.
Commercialize
GTM, partnerships, pricing, market entry, and repeatable revenue — turning interest into a system that pays.
Scale readiness
Story, metrics, and structure to raise and expand — positioning traction clearly for the next round and new markets.
Where Arjun is embedded
Arjun is a Commercial Champion at NUS GRIP, an Entrepreneur in Residence at ATUM Ventures, and a mentor at BLOCK71 and Plug and Play.
The Building Real podcast
Arjun hosts Building Real, an unscripted podcast about how things actually get built. New episodes on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and at buildingreal.com.
Work with Arjun
If you’re working on validation, partnerships, APAC GTM, or fundraising readiness, book a short fit call and Arjun will tell you quickly whether he can help.