Bryan Koh and the business of changing sides

In the photograph, Bryan Koh sits beside Danu Wicaksana, signing a purchase agreement. It is October 2024, and WhiteCoat Global has announced plans to acquire Good Doctor Indonesia. For Koh, a former mergers and acquisitions lawyer, the scene contains a pleasing reversal. He once worked on transactions for other people. Now the expanding company is his own.

A signing photograph is a wonderfully tidy object. Two people, a table, some paper: a business decision reduced to its most presentable instant. It conceals the less photogenic questions. Who will work with whom? Which relationships will survive the change? What happens after everyone puts the pens down? The distinction between understanding a transaction and running the resulting business is where Koh’s career becomes interesting.

He is the founder and chief executive of WhiteCoat Global, based in Singapore. His professional biography includes Allen & Gledhill, the Singapore bar and degrees in both law and commerce from the University of Melbourne. Put those credentials beside the acquisition photograph and there is continuity beneath the career change. The subject matter grew; the contracts followed him.

A family with more than one job title

WhiteCoat’s early story includes his sister Natalie and their father Edmund. The family relationship came with business responsibilities: Bryan ran strategy and operations, Natalie helped create the venture, and Edmund supplied seed funding and strategic guidance. In a household enterprise, a familiar surname can simplify introductions. It does considerably less to settle the question of who decides what.

Edmund described the balance between being a supportive father and a demanding investor. That is a useful complication in Bryan’s story. Family backing belongs in the account alongside the work of building the company. Removing it would make the narrative tidier and less accurate; treating it as the whole explanation would erase the daily decisions that followed.

There is also a difference between inheriting an audience and persuading it. A parent who supplies capital becomes someone to whom results matter in two overlapping ways. The family can celebrate together, but a business still needs responsibilities, budgets and decisions. Affection has many virtues. It is a rather imprecise substitute for a job description.

Years later, Bryan and Natalie would appear together in a public conversation about working with a sibling. That subject offers a more revealing entrance to their partnership than the usual founder mythology. The practical question is how two people who have known each other for years continue to distinguish personal familiarity from professional authority.

What the law degree left behind

Long before the formal qualifications, there was a schoolboy trade in marbles, collectible cards and country erasers. Koh bought items his classmates wanted, repackaged them and sold them at school. His parents noticed that he returned home with more than his pocket money. The explanation was a small business. There is a comic economy to that first parental inquiry: the money required an explanation before the enterprise could earn any applause. The anecdote gives the later résumé a less polished beginning, with customers close enough to meet in the playground.

Koh’s route to the chief executive’s desk passed through corporate mergers and acquisitions at Allen & Gledhill. His legal qualification is independently listed on his professional profile, which records admission as an advocate and solicitor in August 2014. The degrees and the qualification are separate milestones: university supplied the education; admission established his professional standing in Singapore.

The combination of commerce and law gives his résumé an unusually literal connection to the work he later chose. One discipline concerns a business’s economics; the other concerns the obligations through which people agree to conduct it. Neither qualification makes a company work by itself. Together, they make the boundary between an appealing proposal and an enforceable arrangement difficult to ignore.

Seen this way, founding a company did not require Koh to discard his previous profession. It gave that training a different destination. A lawyer can help define the terms of a transaction. An operator has to live with the consequences, including the ones that never earned a paragraph in the agreement. His career puts those two positions in the same biography.

The office fits in his hand

A smaller detail supplies a different view of Koh at work. In a December 2020 conversation about his Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2, he explained his preference for keeping tasks on one device. Conference calls, email and notes competed for attention. Switching between a computer and phone distracted him; the folding screen let him arrange more of the work together.

The attraction was practical. He described taking notes or clearing messages during portions of a call that did not directly involve him, and using the phone in a miniature laptop configuration. The gadget interested him because of what it allowed him to do during a crowded working day. Even a discussion of a new phone became a discussion of the inbox.

There is something agreeably ordinary about that. Corporate portraits rarely include the queue of unanswered messages just outside the frame. Yet those messages are part of the job: decisions awaiting an answer, people awaiting a decision. A folding screen cannot shorten a meeting by itself, but it can give the meeting company. Koh’s device preference is a small, specific glimpse of how he arranged his attention.

“I like that it allows me to multitask.”

Bryan Koh, on his folding phone, 2020

The numbers acquire an address

By February 2023, WhiteCoat was marking the opening of a regional headquarters at one-north in Singapore. The business reported revenue above S$10 million for 2022, following a threefold increase, and Koh described twelve consecutive quarters of revenue growth. These were company figures at a particular point in time, rather than a forecast disguised as a result.

The distinction matters because expansion stories mix the achieved and the hoped-for with remarkable ease. A headquarters can be opened. Revenue can be reported. A fundraising target remains a target until money is secured. Koh’s company was then preparing to seek US$25 million for a Series B round. The amount described an intention to finance the next stage.

An office also gives an abstract ambition an address. A regional business needs somewhere for people to work on the unglamorous connections between markets, teams and commercial relationships. The 2023 moment placed Koh in a familiar founder predicament: explaining what had already grown while asking others to believe in what might grow next. The two arguments must coexist without becoming interchangeable.

A deal that had a prehistory

Later in 2023, Koh publicly described regional expansion as central to WhiteCoat’s plans and said the company was watching for acquisitions that would fit its business. This makes the Good Doctor announcement in October 2024 easier to place. Acquisition had already entered his account of how the company might grow. The signing table was the visible arrival of an earlier stated possibility.

WhiteCoat’s announcement brought a fresh funding round led by Raffles Family Office, with MDI Ventures and the SoftBank Vision Fund joining as investors alongside the transaction. For the combined business, the company reported relationships with more than 130 insurers and 7,500 corporate partners. Those figures describe a network of organisations, each with its own expectations.

A network is an especially useful way to think about the change in Koh’s work. The task becomes coordinating relationships as well as adding locations. More counterparties mean more interfaces between organisations. The acquisition story therefore returns him to a subject his earlier career knew well: how independent parties agree to do something together, and how carefully the agreement has to be carried into practice.

In his own announcement, Koh singled out Wicaksana and colleagues Dieter Werwath and Julian Chan for thanks. The names keep the transaction human. An acquisition may appear as one line in a company timeline, but its public introduction still depends on people acknowledging one another. The photograph shows two signatories; his message recognised a wider group.

Siblings, boundaries and the next conversation

At the Raffles Family Office annual forum in 2024, Bryan and Natalie discussed the boundaries of their working partnership. Natalie’s point was that being his sister did not blur her professional responsibilities. Bryan emphasised discipline, resilience and sustained effort. Their conversation also addressed governance and the value of a team that shares its principles.

That is a more demanding picture of a family business than the phrase sometimes suggests. Familiarity supplies history. Governance supplies a way to make decisions when history alone is insufficient. The siblings’ emphasis on roles gives the partnership its working shape. They can belong to the same family and still need an agreed understanding of what each person does.

By 2025, Koh was speaking at the UBS Leadership Excellence and Development Series alongside Patricia Quek and Ben Charoenwong. The discussion included uncertainty and the transition from corporate law to entrepreneurship. His career had become material for people considering decisions of their own, with the move between professions serving as a point of reference.

His next announced appearance is another conversation about generations. WhiteCoat has listed him for the Raffles Family Office Annual Forum in Singapore on 22 October 2026, on a panel titled “Beyond Succession: Leadership Across Generations.” As of 20 October, that remains a scheduled appearance. The subject sits close to a biography shaped by a father’s investment and a sister’s partnership.

The most satisfying feature of Koh’s story is the change of position. The professional who helped other people make agreements became a founder accountable for what followed his own. That shift is visible in the 2024 photograph without requiring a grand gesture. He sits at a table, signs the document, and takes on the work that the document begins.