Malaysia is awash with profitable start-ups, so why aren’t investors interested?

Like many entrepreneurial Southeast Asians, 35-year-old Malaysian businessman Lee Zhern Je left a stable job to bet on himself. In 2015, he resigned from a major consulting firm in Kuala Lumpur to start Epic Unicorn, his own digital marketing company.

Inspired by his self-made father, Lee and his business partner turned their IT skills into a business – but survival dictated that it became profitable quickly.

“I needed to be able to sustain my lifestyle. So I couldn’t go into start-ups that require investment and time. I needed something that I could sell tomorrow and make money tomorrow,” he said.

Malaysians often feel short-changed when they compare themselves to their Singaporean peers, who are better paid despite being equally competent, well-educated and having skills on par with talent in Singapore and other developed nations, he said.

But starved of venture-capital (VC) funding and similar investments, experts say many Malaysian start-ups don’t have the luxury of scaling or building their businesses with a long-term growth model and are instead compelled to quickly turn a profit.

This confluence of factors has created a breeding ground in Malaysia for innovative start-ups that become rapidly profitable, yet do not attract VC funds. But observers say a turning point may be approaching as investors’ playbooks change.

Shah Zeck, CEO of Big Dataworks, a big-data solutions provider, can attest to the vast amounts of opportunities in Malaysia that small firms like his can tap.

Big Dataworks not only digitalised government compliance at national corporate regulator the Companies Commission of Malaysia, it established an online portal allowing the public to buy data from the regulator without having to turn up in person for