Open For Business

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 floods that demanded immediate community action.

Her response was not a casual retirement hobby. In 2021, Zalina launched Ekar Lui Farm School, a bootstrapped enterprise offering STEM and sustainability-based learning in a real-world agricultural setting. Catering to mainstream schools, corporate leadership programmes, and neurodivergent children, the social enterprise has proven its market demand, growing its operations by 200 percent in 2025 without a single ringgit of external investment.

Zalina talks to us about the tight unit economics of keeping animals fed and children engaged on a bootstrapped budget, how she gained access to grants and collaborations which helped accelerate growth, and what it takes to build a viable ESG education hub that prioritises purpose over pure profit.

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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 vendors. It is a costly industry reality that most tech companies refuse to talk about.

What makes this story unusual is the person telling it. Mahmoud Ashraf (Komy) is a 22-year-old final-year cybersecurity student at Asia Pacific University in Kuala Lumpur. He founded Genta in late 2024 and bootstrapped it to high six-figure revenues in under a year with zero ad spend. Serving enterprise clients across the US and Europe, Genta builds custom AI agents with a strict "no platform lock-in" policy, ensuring clients actually own the infrastructure that gets built.

Komy joins us to expose the growing gap between AI marketing and actual AI engineering. We discuss what it really takes to build reliable artificial intelligence for operations-heavy businesses, why client ownership is becoming the ultimate dealbreaker in enterprise procurement, and how he navigates the grueling balance of running a scaling global business while completing his final year of university.

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Edwin Yap's family built the physical infrastructure of retail. As the leaders of Jemco Group, they grew the family business into Malaysia's largest producer of the shelving, racking, and logistics systems that hold supermarkets and warehouses together across Southeast Asia. Taking over the company during the pandemic, Edwin spent years observing the shop floor and realised the next essential layer of retail infrastructure wouldn't be a static fixture. It would be a robot.

To capitalise on this shift, Edwin launched MR. ROBOT, a startup betting that humanoid and service robots are moving from science fiction to the shop floor faster than most business leaders realise. He recently secured a US$5 million funding round from an investor lineup that includes MR D.I.Y. International, China's AgiBot, and The Hub's Investment Group, signed an MOU at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, and is now developing a RM10 million ASEAN-first robotics data collection centre to power the next generation of physical AI.

Edwin joins us to unpack the business of "embodied AI", how they are already driving a 20 percent sales uplift at customer events, and the honest reality of what humanoid robots can and cannot do in 2026.

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With a massive network of 30 hospitals serving over 3 million patients annually, KPJ Healthcare faces the massive challenge of ensuring consistent, high-quality care across facilities of varying sizes and ages. To achieve this, the group is rolling out the KPJ Health System (KPJHS) — an integrated framework designed to standardise treatment, control costs, and manage patient expectations across the entire network.

Positioned as Malaysia's first private academic health system, KPJHS is built on the core pillars of practice, education, and research & innovation. By centralising highly specialised medical expertise into regional Centers of Excellence (COEs) via a hub-and-spoke model, KPJ ensures patients with complex conditions receive seamless, top-tier care without needing to repeat diagnostic tests or navigate a messy referral process.  

Prof. Dato' Dr. Hanafiah Harunarashid, Chief Medical Director of KPJ Healthcare, joins us to unpack this ambitious operational transformation. We discuss the strategy behind launching 15 COEs by 2030, how a real-time clinical dashboard measures surgical outcomes against global benchmarks like the Mayo Clinic, and the five-year cultural shift required to put the patient at the absolute center of the healthcare system.

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After spending decades in clinical medicine and digital health, Dr. Raymond Choy analysed over three million data points on drug pricing and uncovered a massive inefficiency. In just a four-week trial tracking only six drugs, one insurer saved RM100,000. The waste in the system wasn't theoretical. It was quantifiable.

To fix this broken journey, Dr. Raymond and commercial lead Fabian Lim launched HEYDOC Health. Dubbed the "Waze of Healthcare," the platform doesn't try to replace traditional doctors, clinics, or pharmacies. Instead, it acts as an intelligent orchestrator. Powered by an AI intelligence layer called RightK and a RM29.90 monthly subscription known as FutureK, the platform connects every touchpoint in the outpatient journey to make the entire system smarter, cheaper, and infinitely easier for patients to navigate.

Dr. Raymond and Fabian join us to discuss scaling the business to a RM7m ARR, the validation from their recent Foodpanda pilot, and whether a simple 1-ringgit-a-day subscription can actually solve the quiet sustainability crisis plaguing Malaysian primary care.

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To compete at the international level, Malaysian National Figure Skaters Eunice and Edmund Lai train six hours a day on ice that costs money, with coaches that cost money, in a system that offers very little financial support. For most national athletes in this position, the choice is simple: find a wealthy sponsor or quit the sport entirely.

Instead of waiting for a sponsor, Eunice and Edmund decided to build their own financial engine. They founded Grano Break, an artisan granola brand designed specifically to fund their athletic ambitions: every bag sold is a micro-sponsorship of the duo that directly funds their international coaching and competition fees.

The duo, together with their mother Selina Ling join us to discuss the hidden financial realities of being a national athlete in Malaysia, their pivot into OEM manufacturing, and the intense discipline required to build a profitable business while simultaneously training to represent the country on the global stage.

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In 2017, Spark Liang quit a comfortable job as a Thomson Reuters analyst to make financial literacy videos from his bedroom. Within six months, he organically grew 100,000 Facebook followers and successfully raised RM1.5 million from them through equity crowdfunding on Ata Plus. In a rare startup success story, he bought back those early shares, giving his original investors a massive 300 percent return.  

However, the journey wasn't entirely smooth. After discovering the harsh reality that everyday consumers rarely want to pay for financial education, Spark executed a major business pivot toward B2B corporate training. Today, FinSpark has evolved from a simple media channel into a diversified seven-figure corporate group. The ecosystem now spans financial media, SC-licensed corporate consulting under MMC Financial, and even a TVET institution known as SUMA College.  

Spark joins us to unpack the realities of monetising an online following, why identifying a problem doesn't always equal a viable market, and the group's ambitious five-year roadmap toward a public listing.

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Malaysia's corporate training market runs on slides, seminars, and motivational talks. It is also, by most accounts, not working. Burnout is at record levels. Trust between leaders and teams is eroding. And the soft skills that make the difference — self-awareness, emotional presence, the ability to genuinely listen — are exactly the ones a classroom cannot teach.

Nurul Atiqah Anuar believes the answer might be standing in a paddock.

A Chartered Governance Professional who spent a decade in boardrooms across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, she co-founded Setenang — a leadership development programme built around one of the oldest non-verbal feedback systems in the world: horses. Not riding them. But standing with them, leading them, and being read by them.

Atiqah joins us to talk about how a 500kg animal with no interest in your job title, your KPIs, or your quarterly results will show you — in real time and without filters — exactly who you are as a leader.

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Childhood friends and lifelong gamers Kashif Khairul and Rizal Azlan co-founded 1+1 Studios in 2024 with one conviction: that the best co-op games should bring people closer together, not just put them side by side. Their debut title, Duo Quest, is a co-op roguelite deckbuilder where your friendship is literally a game mechanic — you answer questions about each other to generate attacks, meaning the better you know your partner, the harder you hit.

The game has not yet launched commercially. But it has already won an award at Gamescom Asia in Bangkok, been nominated for Best Multiplayer at Gamescom LATAM 2026, drawn over 5,000 players to a closed playtest, and gone viral in Japan with over a million views. All this from a six-person studio in Kuala Lumpur, with no external funding.

Kashif and Rizal join us to discuss the gap in the co-op game market, why friendship became the design brief, what Malaysian indie developers need to break through and whether the local scene is more ready than it looks.

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Andrew Anthony has been in the events industry since 1995 — when he was still in school, working as an event crewmember to fund his own education, with RM50 and a late brother who showed him the ropes. Three decades later, Define International has ran what Google called their first ever business listing activation in Malaysia, handled a landmark event involving the United States Presidential office, won gold at the MAHB Marketing Excellence Awards, launched a nine-storey ship at Keppel Shipyard in Singapore, and built a list of over 3,000 clients.

And he has done all of this without a single ringgit of external investment. 

Andrew joins us to discuss the RM18 billion industry that policymakers are still not taking seriously enough, the payment terms problem that has plagued the events industry for decades, and the stubbornness of doing things right.

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