Loring Harkness

Loring Harkness is an American-born entrepreneur and ecosystem builder who has spent the better part of a decade founding, funding, and mentoring technology startups in Myanmar and across Southeast Asia. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from St. Olaf College in the United States and a Master of Laws (LLM) from Monash University in Australia, and reports having launched more than ten businesses spanning consulting, travel, real estate, and web production — one company in Japan and several in Myanmar.

His most visible role has been as Founder and CEO of Mote Poh, an "employee-benefits-as-a-service" startup he founded in May 2018. Mote Poh localises the kind of employee-benefits programmes long used by global corporations: it gives employees a rewards booklet of free items and exclusive discounts at 500+ locations across 15 Myanmar cities, on-demand access to earned salary, and unlimited GP consultations via chat, voice, and video. The company raised a seed round on 14–15 February 2019 from EME Myanmar and Vietnam-based VC Nest Tech. He is also Founder of Ngwe.Su, which builds financial-inclusion tools for the under-banked, and was earlier Co-founder and CEO of Next Billion, a venture connecting mission-driven organisations to the "next billion" mobile users via video, radio, apps, and messaging.

Beyond his own ventures, Harkness has been a central figure in Myanmar's startup community. He served as Country Director of Building Markets, an international NGO focused on growing Myanmar's entrepreneurial ecosystem, and curated TEDxYangon (2012) on the theme "People, Planet, Profit." More recently he has taken a commercial leadership role at brainbot technologies AG, a German blockchain/Ethereum-focused technology company (listed as Head of Commercial), signalling a move into Web3 alongside his Southeast Asia work.

Since Myanmar's February 2021 military coup, Harkness has been an outspoken pro-democracy advocate, publicly calling on the U.S. government to recognise Myanmar's National Unity Government / CRPH and to sanction the state oil-and-gas enterprise MOGE and its partners.

• Invests and operates at the seed / early stage, primarily in Myanmar and the broader Southeast Asian frontier markets he knows firsthand.
• Sector conviction in financial inclusion / fintech ("financial inclusion tools for the under-banked" via Ngwe.Su) and HR-tech / employee benefits (Mote Poh), plus impact-driven, "tech for good" consumer platforms (Next Billion).
• Describes Mote Poh's approach as taking benefits models "used for decades by top companies globally" and localising them for an emerging market — a repeatable thesis of adapting proven developed-market models to underserved markets.
• As an ecosystem builder (Building Markets, TEDxYangon), he gravitates toward founders solving inclusion and livelihoods problems and mission-aligned businesses, not purely financial plays.