Open For Business

Virgin Honey makes ready-to-use Acacia honey spoons, with an aim to offer a cleaner and more convenient way to enjoy honey without the mess of a traditional jar. Founded by Veenondhra Subramaniam, the Malaysian FMCG start-up is building a business around a familiar product in a different format. We discuss who buys single-serve honey, how Virgin Honey is building its market, and what it takes to t...

Kakao Origin serves non-alcoholic drinks made with Malaysian single-origin chocolate, the first of its kind in the country. It started as a stall in Central Market and now has a flagship at Dayabumi. We talk about who pays RM16 to RM20 for a cup of chocolate, how they source beans from Malaysian farmers, and whether a drink shop can boost the local cacao industry.  See omnystudio.com/listener...

For more information on BFM's SME event, click the link here . Frank Marini started in the mailroom of an American tour company as a part-time college job. Thirty years later he runs Railbookers Group, the world's largest independent rail holiday company. It builds trips around trains - the rail, the hotels, the sightseeing and the transfers. It offers more than 5,200 rail journeys, employs almost...

For more information on BFM's SME event, click the link here . Can children participate in Malaysia’s growing cashless economy without being exposed to the risks of adult financial products? Vircle founder and CEO Gokula Krishnan Subramaniam believes children need a safer way to manage money, but making digital payments accessible also raises questions about regulation, parental oversight and fina...

For more information on BFM's SME event, click the link here . A year ago, Tupai came on BFM to talk about Malaysia's maths problem. Since then, the numbers have gotten worse. In SPM 2025, 21.7% of candidates did not pass Mathematics, and in the latest PISA, Malaysia's maths score fell to 397 points, with only 35% of 15-year-olds reaching basic proficiency, against 65% across OECD countries. ...

For more information on BFM's SME event, click the link here . In 2014, the first SCORE Marathon drew 3,674 runners. Two months ago in Putrajaya, the 2026 edition drew 51,077 across two days - and was officially entered into the Malaysia Book of Records as the largest running event in the country's history. That is a fourteen-fold increase in twelve years, achieved by a company that has never rais...

For more information on BFM's SME event, click the link here . Everyone has visited a car dealership, yet almost nobody understands the underlying economics. The actual margin on selling a vehicle remains thin; dealerships actually make their money through servicing, parts, and financing. Janessa Kuek operates AG Autoworld, a massive Johor-based Proton 4S dealer group and part of her family's larg...

For more information on BFM's SME event, click the link here . When Inbaraj Suppiah was last on this show, JomHack was a hackathon company - designing and running 48-hour innovation sprints for corporates and government agencies. It is now, to a considerable extent, a school. For the past year JomHack has run a free 30-day Python bootcamp. Daily classes, no fees, and no coding background required....

The Contrast Club opened in Damansara Heights around three months ago: a communal Finnish stone sauna, pool-sized cold plunges, and a hot magnesium pool. You move between them - hot, cold, hot again - in a shared space rather than a private room. That communal choice is the whole idea. Contrast therapy already existed in Kuala Lumpur, but mostly in small rooms built for one or two people. Their be...

Every day, Malaysians discard roughly 13,800 tonnes of food. A significant portion of this isn't consumer waste - it is perfectly edible surplus that merchants produce to manage the unpredictability of daily walk-in traffic. Value Food was built to solve this inefficiency. The app allows merchants to package their unsold inventory into "Value Bags," selling them at a fraction of the original price...

Spanish Cellar KL is a fully bootstrapped, three-million-ringgit gourmet import business supplying the Malaysian market with premium Spanish olive oils, farmhouse cheeses, wines, saffron, and cured meats. The company operates across three distinct revenue streams: B2B distribution to restaurants and hotels, direct-to-consumer retail, and private dining events.  Founder Victor Dejesus’ traject...

Otti is a corporate training and research institute focused on what it calls "Human-AI Synergy". The Institute teaches professionals to aggressively leverage AI for productivity without sacrificing independent, critical human thought. Co-founded in 2020 by neuroscientist Aster Wei alongside Cambridge-trained psycholinguist Chang Yin Jue and REDtone technopreneur Dato' Wei Chuan Beng, Otti now gene...

Three women who have been friends for thirty years each built a business in wellness. Raja Jesrina Arshad scaled PurelyB into an eight-figure superfood brand. Diane Chia co-founded Millennia Village, an integrated lifestyle destination for active seniors. Sarah Lian built Supparetreat, a women-focused wellness community. Then they built something together. The Women Wellness Festival began as a ga...

Paws Rehab is Malaysia's leading animal rehabilitation centre, operating as a highly profitable, mid-six-figure enterprise. Founded in 2012 by Sydney Chik, a UK-trained physiotherapist who traveled to the US to become a Certified Canine Rehabilitation Practitioner, the clinic addresses a gap in the local veterinary market.  Offering advanced hydrotherapy, laser therapy, and pulsed electromagn...

Modern factories operate on extreme precision, meticulously tracking yield histories, supplier metrics, and machine maintenance schedules. Yet, they possess almost zero institutional memory regarding their own hiring history. Revo is an HR technology platform built to fix this operational blind spot.  Rather than replacing a company's applicant tracking software, Revo sits underneath existing...

Chef Ben Chua operates a highly specialised, fully bootstrapped sourdough baking studio out of Tropicana Avenue, Petaling Jaya. Following a deliberate, unconventional eight-year apprenticeship (which spanned a finance degree, a stint as a Grab driver, and an unpaid bakery internship while working as a commis chef at two-Michelin-starred Dewakan) he built a physical education business rooted entire...

After spending two decades building apps, websites, and CRM systems for Southeast Asian enterprises, Steve Wan watched his clients pour increasing budgets into traditional digital advertising models for diminishing returns. Realising that interactive campaigns effectively captured consumer attention but were prohibitively expensive to custom-build, he launched RewardinMe. Today, the bootstrapped,...

When award-winning architect Katrine Cheong last appeared on the show in December 2024, the conversation centered around the design mechanics of building Little Precious, a premium confinement centre in KL Eco City. Today, she returns to discuss a drastically different reality: the shifting economic ground beneath the maternity business. Since opening in 2020, her single-site, 20,000-square-foot f...

Ghostbird Coffee started in 2015 out of operational frustration. After transitioning from the IT industry to help found The Owls Café, Thomas Ooi and Tiong Hsien Qing realised they wanted absolute control over their most critical supply chain element: their coffee. What began as a small Seputeh roastery built to supply their own shops has scaled into a massive nationwide B2B operation. Growing fro...

Ling's Focacceria operated on an incredibly focused business model: one type of dough, transformed into a menu of focaccia loaves and sandwiches featuring Malaysian flavors like otak-otak, and vadai. Built by a former corporate communications and copywriting professional with zero F&B background, the Mutiara Damansara shop survived a brutal first year of poor management and severe debt. By tig...

Faramore is a bootstrapped, direct-to-consumer footwear brand solving a highly specific market gap: affordable, handmade shoes designed exclusively for women with wide, chubby, or bunion-prone feet. Operating on a strict pre-order model to maintain clean cash flow and eliminate excess inventory, the brand prices its entire catalogue under RM95. By leveraging organic customer acquisition through fo...

How do you turn a Pan Mee restaurant into a scalable FMCG business? For Meet Mee, the answer came when COVID forced the company to rethink how it could reach customers beyond its restaurants. Co-Founder Chan Foo Chuen shares how the company developed its instant Pan Mee, built a business across e-commerce and retail, and grew annual revenue from under RM1 million in 2020 to more than RM10 million...

Founded in Kota Kinabalu in 2015, Borenos Fried Chicken is an independent fast-food chain that has steadily grown into a highly successful eight-figure enterprise. Over the past twelve months, the company has aggressively scaled from six to eleven outlets,  officially establishing a foothold in the Klang Valley with locations in Puchong, Damansara Uptown, and Bandar Baru Bangi. Along the way,...

As residential floor plans across the Klang Valley continue to shrink, Mocof has built a highly profitable, seven-figure business by addressing the gap in spatial efficiency. Operating under the SPAZE label, the company manufactures premium transformable furniture, such as wall beds that fold into shelving and sofas that convert into beds, engineered with high-end European compressed-air mechanism...

Atlas Collectif is a performance running apparel brand operating out of Kuala Lumpur and Dubai, producing technical kits built on design, performance, and sustainability.  Within three years of launching, the brand has scaled to over RM3 million in annual revenue, recording 178 percent year-on-year growth. Operating with a lean core team of just six people, the business has successfully estab...