A small studio for ambitious teams.
We started Sampan Labs in 2023 to give founders and small businesses the kind of product team usually reserved for banks and unicorns. Three years and 60-odd products later, we're 14 people in a shophouse on Tanjong Pagar Road.
Hazel spent eight years designing banking apps. Arjun spent ten building logistics platforms. Both kept meeting small-business owners who needed good software and couldn't find anyone to build it properly at a size and price that made sense.
So we opened a studio built for them: small senior teams, clear fixed scopes and weekly demos. When AI coding tools became good enough to matter, we adopted them early, with one firm rule: they make us faster, but a named engineer owns every line that ships.
Most of our clients are startups and SMEs in Singapore, with a few in Malaysia and Indonesia, and many of them sell across the region. We turn down more projects than we take on, so we can do the ones we take on properly.
Three rules we don't bend.
Ship the small thing
A product in customers’ hands teaches more than a perfect plan. We cut scope before we cut quality.
Humans own the work
AI makes us faster. It doesn’t make decisions, and it never merges code. Every line has an engineer’s name on it.
Say it plainly
Clear scopes, honest timelines and weekly demos. If something is late or risky, you hear it from us first.
Some of the people you'll work with
Faster tools. Same accountability.
- AI tools draft scaffolding, tests, migrations and docs. Engineers design the architecture, data model and security.
- Every pull request is reviewed by a human against our twelve-point checklist before it merges.
- We use business-tier tools that don't train on client code or data. Secrets and personal data never go into prompts.
- Clients own everything we produce, including AI-assisted code, on final payment.
Tanjong Pagar, Singapore
A shophouse studio about five minutes' walk from Tanjong Pagar MRT. We'll send the exact address and directions when you book a visit.
Mon–Fri, 9am–6pm (GMT+8). Visits by appointment. We'll put the kopi on.
Book a visit