Open For Business

In 2008, Alann Tan returned from New Zealand without his degree and with no business plan, driven home by his father's cancer diagnosis. To survive, he and his brother opened a humble market stall selling pineapple tarts and Chinese New Year kuih. Despite a RM500,000 early loss that nearly wiped them out, that small survival mechanism quietly laid the foundation for what is now a sophisticated, mu...

Traditional hotels often force guests to pay for luxury features they simply do not use. Recognising this gap, Benny Ong and his co-founders launched KiN Hotel Group in 2023. Coming from diverse backgrounds in technology, marketing, and real estate, they viewed their complete lack of hospitality experience as a massive competitive advantage. By treating operations as a blank canvas and avoiding le...

Traditional cross-border payments are plagued by a severe lack of predictability. Relying on an outdated correspondent banking network and the SWIFT system, global money transfers are often slow and leave customers waiting without any clarity on when their funds will arrive. Raj Kamal, an executive with two decades of experience in the payments industry, realised the core issue was a lack of unive...

In April 2019, Muhammad Hamizan Zaidi opened Affogato, a popular coffee and ice cream dessert cafe in Kuching. Capitalising on a loyal community following, the concept soon expanded into a second lot right next door to become Oregano by Affogato, a pasta-forward restaurant blending Sarawakian ingredients with Italian fusion. Together, these ventures built the foundation of a seven-figure multi-bra...

While the rest of Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem was chasing consumer-driven "unicorn" narratives and burning cash on a race for user growth at all costs, Indelible Ventures took a completely different path. Since its launch, this early-stage venture capital firm has avoided consumer hype to bet heavily on B2B enterprise software. Managing Partner Kevin Brockland joins us to explain why he avo...

Most fashion businesses begin with a gap in the market. Kayla Batik Design began with a mother who couldn't find colourful batik clothing for her one-year-old daughter. So she decided to make it herself. What started as designing a single dress for her toddler, has become a fully bootstrapped, profitable modern batik brand stocked in boutiques and department stores across Malaysia and as far as Ge...

Matcha took a decade to go from Japanese tea ceremony to global café staple. Shivaani Suppiah believes pandan, that fragrant green leaf that flavours everything from kaya to nasi lemak across Southeast Asia, is ready for the same journey. Her target market: India. Her base: Pondicherry, a former French colony on the southeastern coast, chosen specifically for its mix of locals, international trave...

When Mathew Howe was last on Open For Business in July 2024, Grobrix had just announced its partnership with Green City Growers in Boston and was projecting 500% quarterly revenue growth from its Farming-as-a-Service subscription model. The question then was whether a banker-turned-urban-farmer with a patented Lego-inspired green wall system could build a serious commercial business across Singapo...

Most professional networking events fail because they focus on collecting business cards rather than building genuine connections. Jude Ashvin realised this after experiencing a highly curated after-work social event in Belgium. Drawing on his background managing the business and logistics for the Malaysian live band Rhythm Nation, he decided to bring this refined approach home to Kuala Lumpur to...

Hagen Chen originally built a fully bootstrapped, seven-figure F&B group starting with Toast Maker, a healthy sandwich and coffee concept for busy professionals. However, his latest venture marks a significant pivot. Stepping away from health-focused cafe fare, Hagen recently launched Jiran-jiran, a brand new community-centric concept dedicated to serving traditional Malaysian nasi lemak. What...

Most cafes do not survive ten years, and those that do typically rely on relentless expansion to stay afloat. Naj & Belle reached this rare milestone by doing the exact opposite. Founded in 2015 by Annabelle Liau and Datuk Najib Hamid of The Serai Group, the premium dessert and dining cafe launched in Subang with a foundation built on a deep family passion for hospitality. Famous for introduci...

Across Malaysia and Southeast Asia, thousands of profitable businesses are quietly approaching a major crisis. Their founders are entering their sixties and seventies, and the next generation either does not want to take over or is simply not ready to lead. This succession gap leaves many highly successful enterprises in a vulnerable position, threatening businesses that took decades of hard work...

MicFront is not a traditional public speaking class; it is a psychology-first education model. Co-founded in 2017 by Mas Mahathir and licensed counsellor Dr Jolynn Ch'ng, the academy operates on the thesis that speaking anxiety is a psychological barrier rather than a mechanical flaw. This distinct curriculum differentiator has proven highly successful commercially, allowing the company to scale r...

KC Purusotman began his career at just 15 years old by throwing parties. Twenty-five years later, he operates one of Malaysia's most diverse and dynamic hospitality companies. Continuum Hospitality Group manages an expansive portfolio that features the Pinkfish Music & Arts Festival alongside prominent nightclubs like Kyo KL. In the culinary space, the group also operates the rapidly expanding...

Frontline staff in hospitality and facility management are often treated as the forgotten workforce. Many lack corporate email addresses and are forced to endure long, tedious training sessions through traditional learning management systems. Matthew Spriegel saw this disconnect and founded Atiom, a behavioural technology platform built specifically for service industries. Acting more like TikTok...

In 2016, a faded 1930s Art Deco building in Kuala Lumpur's Chinatown sold for RM29 million. Once the tallest building in the city, its architectural history had been completely obscured by commercial signboards and neglect. Justin Chen and his family's Singapore-based real estate group, Arcc Holdings, acquired the building and spent six years carefully determining its commercial future. The result...

Every business deal relies on knowing exactly who you are dealing with, but mapping corporate relationships across Asia is an incredibly challenging task. Daryl Neo spent years as a regulator at the Singapore Exchange, manually tracing ownership chains and trying to uncover who was truly behind complex business structures. As corporate networks expanded and data volumes exploded, this painstaking...

Small business owners often look at a declining pipeline and assume they have a sales problem, but what they usually have is a leadership deficit. Lacking the capital to hire a high-quality, full-time sales director, many SMEs resort to one-off, traditional sales training workshops. However, these event-based sessions often fail to produce sustainable results because they do not embed actual behav...

Operating a restaurant in Singapore is exceptionally challenging. With world-leading commercial rents, strict labour laws, and volatile food costs, traditional F&B margins are razor-thin. Joseph Ryan spent years navigating this system, opening major outlets like Five Guys for the Zouk Group in Malaysia. Seeing these structural flaws worsen after the pandemic, he realised the industry needed a...

When Choy Peng Yew last appeared on the show in early 2023, Pet World was on a massive growth trajectory. As Malaysia's largest homegrown pet food manufacturer behind household brands like ProDiet, ProBalance, and Delizios, the company was scaling at an impressive 27% CAGR. At the time, financial headlines were buzzing about a potential US$100M public listing in Singapore. However, the IPO never m...

Fresh off an $8 million Series A funding round co-led personally by the CEO of Bybit, David Low, Co-Founder and CEO of Hata, unpacks what’s next for this young crypto exchange.  We discuss how the platform accumulated over 225,000 users and passed RM100 million in assets under custody, the heavy capital requirements needed to incentivise professional market makers for deep order-book liquidit...

Red Communications has been running since 1999 — 26 years of producing television, film, branded content, and digital programming for audiences that the industry had largely ignored: women, young people, families. The 3R show ran for 15 years and was funded entirely by sponsors. Gol & Gincu became a film and a TV series. Kami did the same. Oh My English ran for six years on Astro. Club Mickey...

In Japan and South Korea, parking a car is entirely automated. You drive into a bay, turn off your engine, and walk away while a robotic system lifts and stores your vehicle in a multi-level tower. There are no ramps, no circling for spots, and no wasted space. Yet in Malaysia, this highly efficient infrastructure remains virtually unseen. Ir. Yow Kai Yong has spent the last 14 years trying to cha...

After a 30-year career at PETRONAS, a pandemic-induced mental health challenge pushed Zalina Abdul Rahim to completely rethink her retirement. Retreating to her family's farm in Hulu Langat, she witnessed three distinct crises converging at once: a generation of city children completely disconnected from nature, neighbouring farmers losing their entire harvests to lockdowns, and devastating local...

The enterprise AI market is currently flooded with polished demos, confident sales pitches, and massive invoices. But behind the scenes, many of these highly touted agents and automation platforms break the moment they encounter real data, real users, and edge cases. Genta AI Solutions has been hired repeatedly to fix this exact problem, stepping in to replace failing AI systems built by other ven...