Ivan Teh, Fusionex Malaysia and the business of making data useful

Before Fusionex, Ivan Teh’s career ran through two American technology majors, Intel and Hewlett-Packard, followed by Accenture in Malaysia, according to Digital News Asia. The experience gave him two vantage points: the engineering of large systems and the business problems those systems were meant to solve.

He told Malay Mail in 2014 that the company had grown without angel or venture investors, funded by customers, and that he spent the first six months writing the platform’s foundation himself while interviewing prospective clients. His goal, he said, was software that was easy to use and helped organisations make sense of their data.

In January 2015, Fusionex signed a memorandum with MDEC to build an industry driven Centre of Excellence in the National Big Data Analytics Innovation Network. In September 2016, Bursa Malaysia appointed it as a preferred vendor for enterprise data analytics, to help the exchange track patterns across stock and price movements.

Later projects moved into healthcare, agriculture and trade. Fusionex and IMU piloted big data analytics modules in five medical and health sciences programmes. The Malaysian Palm Oil Board announced a smart palm oil mill with Fusionex at Keratong in Pahang in 2022, and MATRADE launched its Digital Trade Platform with the company in 2023. MATRADE also lists Fusionex as an MDEC Global Acceleration and Innovation Network company.

MATRADE’s 2023 announcement gives a sense of scale. At launch, the platform built with Fusionex already had more than 1,200 members, from large corporations to SMEs, and had hosted buyers from markets including China, Japan, Korea, the UK, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India and much of Southeast Asia. Sectors ran from franchising, oil and gas and palm oil to pharmaceuticals and information technology. MATRADE’s chief executive, Datuk Mohd Mustafa Abdul Aziz, called it the outcome of a strategic collaboration with Fusionex Group.

The palm oil project applies similar thinking to the plantation economy. MPOB’s director general, Datuk Ahmad Parveez Ghulam Kadir, said sensors in the Keratong mill would decide whether fruit was ripe, and that the plant was expected to lower its carbon footprint, lift output and reduce manpower by up to 30 per cent. When it was announced, the mill was in the final stage of local authority approval, with construction expected the following year.

Both projects pair a public agency’s goal with a data and automation layer supplied by the company, a pattern visible across the Ivan Teh Fusionex Malaysia record. This site reports each one as it was described at the time and will add outcomes only once they are published.