A Chat with Warren Woon, CFA: Co-founder and CEO, Ndara; Entrepreneur connecting capital, creativity, and distributed intelligence

This week, Stephen Ibaraki has an exclusive interview with Warren Woon, CFA.

From managing capital to building a different future for intelligence

Warren Woon's career has crossed investment management, creative experiences, immersive technology, and AI. Having spent 23 years in Hawaii before making Singapore his focus in 2018, he brings an international perspective and an unconventional combination of financial discipline, creative curiosity, and practical entrepreneurship to the businesses he builds.

Intelligence where people live and work

Warren's longer term hypothesis is that AI will become a utility: useful intelligence available where people need it, woven into everyday work and infrastructure rather than confined to individual applications or distant platforms.

NDara builds on technology with roots in US intelligence and national laboratory work. Its foundation, Dr. J. C. Smart's AvesTerra technology, uses a peer to peer architecture to connect distributed systems through a shared knowledge space. Rather than requiring every organisation to copy its information into a central repository, the architecture enables existing systems to participate through adapters, connecting knowledge while referencing information where it lives.

Warren is extending this vision through work combining distributed wind energy, local computing, connectivity, and NDara's knowledge architecture. The ambition is to bring power and intelligence closer to communities and industries beyond the reliable reach of conventional infrastructure and electricity grids. This is not about replacing current AI efforts, but creating a complementary path that expands where, and for whom, they can be useful. The combination of wind infrastructure and locally delivered intelligence is an active development direction for the collaboration.

As the industry considers the infrastructure and resources needed to support AI's growth, Warren asks a different question: rather than bringing everyone's data and energy to ever larger centres, what if useful intelligence could come to them...while preserving local knowledge, privacy, and control?

Starting with consequential decisions

NDara's enterprise work provides a practical starting point. Its Command Centers help organisations connect fragmented information, apply business rules, prescribe actions, and retain evidence of decisions and outcomes. Initial applications include hotel operations, food systems, and QuickEETs, an export readiness service beginning with the Philippines to UAE trade corridor.

For Warren, these are human problems before they are technology problems: a hotel employee trying to prevent a service failure, a kitchen team making a safe substitution, or an exporter discovering a missing requirement before goods leave the country.

A recurring concern in his work is the distinction between delegating a task and losing the capability to understand it. He believes AI should strengthen organisational judgment and institutional memory, not quietly make businesses dependent on systems they can no longer challenge or explain.