Zopim is six-year old  Singaporean startup that provides live chat softwares for websites. Zopim creates amazingly simple and affordable customer engagement tools that help online businesses engage their customers. Their award-winning flagship product Zopim Live Chat, is the most popular Live Chat software globally with more than 120,000+ websites actively using to chat with 260 millions website visitors every month in 54 languages.

Zopim has four co-founders who all met in the San Francisco Bay Area while attending the NUS Overseas College Program. Shortly after returning to Singapore, they crashed a networking event where the famous venture capitalist, Tim Draper, was present. An elevator pitch later, Tim was intrigued enough to request a demo of Zopim at his Sandhill office. A prototype was feverishly developed in two months and presented to Tim. While he passed on the opportunity to invest at that early stage, Zopim managed to raise seed funding through the iJam grant, administered by NUS and a Singapore government agency MDA.

To achieve current success, the founders have all gone through tons of hard work in the early years. They worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day and everyone lived on a meagre monthly salary of S$500 (about $410) for two years, that amount is comparable to the weekly expenses for many of their peers who had just graduated. It was tough but there were necessary sacrifices to be made as none of the founders were born with proverbial silver spoons stuck in their mouths.