We're Fighting for the Small Business Owner

I Built This Because I Lived the Struggle

I have been chasing this problem since I was nineteen.

My first business was selling smartphones online, cash on delivery, back when nobody trusted online payment. The phones themselves made almost nothing. The real margin was in the screen protector and the casing, the follow-on sale to a customer who already trusted you. And I kept fumbling it, sometimes literally: applying a screen protector cleanly is a real skill, and my hands failed me so often it ate the profit. I walked away from that business with the lesson that has followed me ever since: the money is in the follow-through, and knowing that means nothing without a system that executes it every single time.

At university I invested my own savings, did well, and started teaching others how. That grew into an education business we built past RM10 million in revenue. And the moment that business truly turned the corner is one I will never forget, because it was not a marketing idea. My wife, then my girlfriend between jobs, became the one person who sent every reminder message on WhatsApp. On time, every time. Attendance shot up. Closing shot up. Same ads, same offer, same speaker. One consistent person doing follow-up took the company from sometimes-profitable to properly profitable. I did not have a lead problem. I had a follow-up problem wearing a lead problem's clothes.

But you cannot scale a person. As we grew, I was drowning. Leads were pouring in from ads, but my team could not reply fast enough. Follow-ups were inconsistent: some leads got called three times, others got forgotten. I was spending more time managing people than building the business.

And the part that wore me down the most: I could not see any of it. When I asked how sales were going, all I heard was "leads are not good." Nobody could tell me why. Which follow-ups happened, which leads went cold, which objections kept repeating: I only found out at month end, long after the leads were gone. In my hardest year, when the whole industry turned at once, that blindness nearly broke us. Sales dropped, I pushed the team harder, the pushing created friction, and I still could not get a clear answer to the only question that mattered: why.

And here is the thing I had to accept: my team was never going to care about this business the way I do. That is not a criticism. It is just reality. They go home at 6PM. The business stays on my mind at midnight.

Then, in the middle of 2023, running an offline event, I watched my team answer the same repetitive questions on WhatsApp for the thousandth time. The new AI models had just arrived. I tested one, and it was frighteningly good. The thought landed fully formed: what if this lived inside WhatsApp?

Through my best friend, I sent one question to his brother-in-law, a developer I had heard about for years, always with the impression that he was super amazing, but never had a reason to meet: is this buildable? The answer came back yes. I bought a flight ticket that same week. That trip became a partnership, and that partnership became this company. He is my cofounder today.

We deployed the first version into my own education business before we ever sold it to anyone. We told customers plainly that it was AI, back when the technology was far less polished than it is now. They used it anyway, and the sales came anyway. That told us everything we needed to know.

Today, together with my cofounder, we are building what we call the AI operating system for growing businesses. It starts with AI Employees running sales on WhatsApp, because that is where the money is for most SMEs. And above them sits AI Manager, because we learned the hard way that automating the replies is only half the answer. The other half is finally seeing your own business clearly. AI Manager reads every conversation so you do not have to, and tells you what is actually happening: the drop-offs, the missed opportunities, the patterns, every morning if you want it.

The technology is incredibly powerful. But most business owners are not tech people. They are passionate about their craft, their customers, their product. That is the gap we fill. You do not need to understand AI. You need business results. We bring the business acumen and the technology together so it actually works for you. At the end of the day, AI is just a tool. But like any tool, you need someone who knows how to wield it. That is what we do.

More than 800 businesses across Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan now run on this.

We want every business owner to wake up knowing their business is running, their leads are being followed up, their customers are being taken care of, without depending on whether someone else showed up and gave 100 percent that day.

Everything we sell is something I needed first. Been there. Done that.