This 41-year-old CEO quit finance to build a multimillion-dollar coffee robot business

This 41-year-old CEO quit finance to build a multimillion-dollar coffee robot business

Long black. Flat white. Iced latte. However you take your coffee, Ella — Singapore's first fully autonomous coffee barista — has got you covered. Ella is the multimillion-dollar brainchild of 41-year-old Keith Tan, a former wealth manager who gave up the daily grind in 2015 to launch his own chain of coffee shops. "I was 35 years old, in finance, and I thought: 'It's my chance.' I've got to do something, build something for myself," Tan told But it wasn't long after he got the coffee joint off the ground that he began to discover manpower issues within the food and beverage industry.  "We had four shops that were facing labor crunch, and I thought, 'I've just invested in this company, it's going to grow, it's going to grow more than that!' So, then I decided it's time to really look into technology," said Tan, who is the founder and CEO of Crown Digital. With that, the idea for Crown Digital was born: an internet of things start-up aiming to address the difficulties within the F&B sector. Ella is the company's debut product — an automated robot designed to replicate the work of a human coffee server. Created in