Tan Hsaw Jiun

Jiun grew up watching Malaysian small businesses run on WhatsApp. Restaurants taking orders by chat. Salons confirming appointments by voice notes. Online sellers replying to DMs at 11pm because that's when customers actually message. The pattern was obvious: Malaysian commerce happens in the inbox, not on websites.

What was just as obvious was where it broke. Customers asking "still available ah?" at 9:47pm and hearing back at 10am the next morning. By then they'd already bought from a competitor who replied in two minutes. Owners weren't lazy. They were drowning. One person, three platforms, three languages, no one to cover the next shift.

In late March 2026, Jiun started sketching what would become Polaris: an AI sales assistant that reads the message, gets what the customer means in English, Bahasa Malaysia, or Chinese, and replies the way the owner would have, with the right product, the right price, and a clear next step. Not a clunky keyword bot. Not a generic chatbot. A trained assistant that knows your business and hands the chat to a real person when it should.

April 2026 went to Meta Business verification: the slow, paperwork-heavy process of getting a verified WhatsApp Business API account, an Instagram Messaging API, and a Facebook page connected. That approval is still in progress. In the meantime the product is built and ready, run from Cheras, Selangor, and we're lining up our first businesses to switch on the moment it clears.

Jiun believes Malaysian SMEs deserve software built for how they actually work: in two languages, on the phone first, private by default under the PDPA, and priced for a single owner, not a 50-seat company. That's the bar Polaris is held to.