GEORGE TOWN, Aug 7 — Starting a tech company is challenging, and often fraught with obstacles and uncertainties. However, for those technopreneurs who persevere, it can lead to remarkable success and recognition.
One such inspiring example is Kelvin Soo Ming Fu. At 26, he founded his tech startup, Byondwave Consulting Sdn Bhd. His journey began with establishing a sole enterprise after receiving a project offer as a system analysis consultant for a German company during his time in Germany.
“That was when I started freelancing as a consultant with SAP SE in Germany,” he said.
SAP SE is a German System Analysis Program Development company and one of the top 10 software companies in the world.
“The advantage of starting a software company is that we do not need large funds to start so once I get more revenue from my work with SAP SE, I was able to set up an office, renovate it and hire a larger team,” he said.
He said the contract with the German company lasted for almost 10 years, which strengthened his company, and on top of that, they also had clients from Japan.
The company had built up a team of 20 staff when the Covid-19 pandemic hit and the projects came to a halt.
Soo said he had to cut costs and let go of half of the staff while they switched the company’s focus to target local small-medium enterprises.
“It was not easy as we have to offer affordable software solutions for local SMEs to get more customers,” he said.
Moving with the times
Today, Byondwave Consulting has won several awards which include the winner of emerging SMe in the Golden Bull Award, the Asia Pacific TOP Excellence service award, winner of fast-moving companies by SME100.
They have also managed to gather many clients, most of which are mid-sized manufacturing companies, in Kuala Lumpur, Sarawak, Johor and Penang.
Soo also received recognition as a professional technologist last year by the Malaysia Board of Technologists.
“I want to continue to expand my company but it is not easy to get investors so our target is to get more clients to be able to fund our own expansion,” he said.
He had also applied for several government grants but to no avail.
Another startup founder, Daren Tan, established a company offering customised technological solutions in fintech and health-tech.
He has also made it his mission to upskill workers and fresh graduates through his company, Alphv Technologies.
Tan had started the company in 2017 on a part-time basis before he collected enough revenue from his business to quit his job and concentrate fully on his company.
“I officially incorporated the company in April last year and aside from offering consultation for custom tech for fintech and healthtech, we also offer training to the public and for corporate clients to upskill their employees,” he said.
The company now has a team of seven in its software development department and another five in the training department.
The company offers digital solutions with a focus on data science, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, DevOps and MLOps, website design and development, mobile app development and computer vision systems.
DevOps is a combination of the words software development (dev) and operations (ops) while MLOps stands for machine learning operations.
Tan said they have clients in Kuala Lumpur and Penang while their first client in which they offer data science training was Penang Forward School.
“I have plans to set up Alphv Academy so we can provide business-to-business corporate training,” he said.
He said they want to provide a service for businesses by training graduates and workers to be industry-ready so that they can be placed in the industry directly.
“Many companies are finding it hard to hire industry-ready talents so we want to train them and prepare them to meet the demand,” he said.
He said there is also a plan to create a job portal for the technology industry where they can train the tech talents and then match them with companies searching for such talents.
