Ask Michelle Ngiam why she started MEURAKI, and she will paint a vivid picture. A mother lies awake at 2am, her mind racing during a difficult period after the birth of her second daughter, when she was struggling with anxiety. All she wants is someone to talk to, yet she does not want to wake anyone or burden her friends with a late-night call.
It was not the first time motherhood had tested her so deeply. Michelle had also experienced a miscarriage, around the time her first ideas about well-being began to take shape. Counselling helped her regain perspective, but one question lingered. If she could feel this isolated despite a strong support system, what about people who had none?
Looking back, Michelle sees that period as the start of something she would only understand later: learning to turn pain into purpose.
The Birth of MEURAKI
Motherhood changed how Michelle thought about identity, ambition, and what it meant to care deeply for others while still being a person with needs, dreams, and fears of her own.
After her second daughter was born, she created a folder called “Meraki”, a Greek word for putting love, joy, and creativity into what you do, and began filling it with thoughts, research, and ideas. When the idea became concrete, she looked for a more distinctive name and found another Greek word, “Eudaimonia”, the idea of living a purposeful and flourishing life. Combining the two gave her MEURAKI.
That journey gave Michelle a philosophy she still carries: turn pain into purpose, and purpose into impact. “The pain was personal,” she says. “But I never wanted the purpose to end with me.”
A Framework for Well-being
MEURAKI Pte. Ltd. was incorporated on 1 July 2024, but Michelle chose to launch it publicly on 24 July 2025, a nod to her vision of a wellness companion available 24/7. To ground that ambition, she drew on the Eight Dimensions of Wellness framework by American researcher Dr Peggy Swarbrick, which spans physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, financial, occupational, social, and environmental wellness. Michelle felt that most people neglect at least one of these dimensions, and that nobody balances them all perfectly.
Even before launch, she tested her ideas, introducing members of the public to the framework in 2024 and creating environmental wellness cards for children. As people shared their own experiences and struggles with her, the idea stopped feeling like something that existed only in her head.
Michelle’s own background shaped the founder she became. Sociology taught her to see people in relation to the systems around them, and her years in financial services taught her discipline, accountability, and the importance of trust. From her entrepreneur father, she learnt perseverance and responsibility. From her mother, she learnt how to be present and care for others. “Sometimes your life only makes sense in reverse,” she says.
Into the Phygital World
Over time, MEURAKI evolved from a 24/7 wellness companion into a technology company exploring how digital personalisation, real-world participation, and human insight can work together across everyday life. Through its digital platform, MEURAKI connects people to personalised journeys across the real-world environments they are already part of.
Michelle began thinking about how technology could create continuity across those environments. A workplace, event, mall, or destination could serve as a physical entry point, while a digital layer makes the journey more personalised and connected. This became MEURAKI’s “phygital” approach. The goal was never simply to create more events, but to make existing real-world environments more meaningful to the people moving through them.
Resilience Through Doubt
Because MEURAKI did not fit neatly into an existing category, people often struggled to understand what it was, and some questioned whether there was demand for it. Some days, Michelle went home feeling empty, wondering whether she was the right person to take MEURAKI where it needed to go.
She has since come to see doubt as a constant rather than a phase. What has changed is her understanding of resilience. “Resilience is not about whether something shakes you. It is about what you do after you have been shaken.” She has also stopped waiting for everyone to believe in her. “My job cannot be to eliminate all doubt. My job is to keep becoming the founder capable of building what I said I would build.”
That growth is reflected in the brand itself. MEURAKI launched with the tagline “Holistic Wellness Revolution”. Exactly a year later, on 24 July 2026, it became “For Every Human Journey”.
Making Well-being Participatory
One of the clearest expressions of Michelle’s thinking is INNERDRIVE®, MEURAKI’s raceing-season initiative exploring human performance, resilience, and well-being through participation. Instead of simply telling people about well-being, it lets them experience those ideas in the physical world, supported by a connected digital journey. Its first edition welcomed participants of more than 40 nationalities, and by its second edition in 2026 it had grown into a citywide experience.
What stayed with Michelle most was watching people challenge their friends and talk openly about how they reacted under pressure. A serious conversation about well-being had become playful and social. “That principle now influences almost everything we create,” she says. The question she now asks of every project is how to turn something people might passively consume into something they actively take part in.
The same philosophy shapes her growing work as a speaker on well-being and resilience. For someone whose idea began on nights when she did not know who to turn to, there is something meaningful in now helping others start conversations of their own.
Still Standing, Still Building
Today, the people who most shape Michelle’s definition of success are her two daughters. “Before children, legacy can feel abstract,” she says. “Once you become a parent, the next generation suddenly has a face. It is sitting at your dining table, asking questions and watching how you live.”
Receiving the Spirit of Enterprise Start-up Award moved her to tears. After so long explaining something people did not always understand, it felt like recognition from outside the company. “For a moment, it felt as though somebody outside the company was saying, ‘We see what you have been trying to build.'” Still, she does not feel she has made it.
Her vision for MEURAKI continues to grow, towards building intelligence around human journeys that helps people understand themselves while helping organisations become genuinely useful within those journeys. “The future of personalisation should not only be about knowing more,” she says. “It should be about becoming more useful.”
Begin Before You Feel Ready
Michelle’s message to anyone starting out is not to wait until they feel extraordinary enough to begin. She studied Sociology, built a career in financial services, became a mother, experienced loss, struggled, changed direction, and started again. You do not need a perfectly linear background, she says, nor do you need to be fearless or have everyone understand your vision before you begin.
She hopes her team will remember that she believes in them and wants to help them grow, and that her daughters will remember a mother who cares deeply, dreams big, and keeps trying. Michelle’s journey began with pain. She found a way to turn that pain into purpose. Now, she is trying to turn that purpose into impact.
Website: https://meuraki.com/
AUTHOR BIO
ALAN KOH
Alan Koh is the Founder and CEO of Impossible Marketing, a group of companies renowned for hyperlocal marketing strategies tailored to businesses in Singapore. His professional journey began in the banking sector, where he quickly rose through the ranks, garnering eight industry awards in just four years.
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