The Company That Made Purchase Orders Exciting

Most people go their whole lives without thinking about a purchase order. It is the paperwork of buying things in bulk - who ordered what, from whom, at what price, and whether anyone signed off. In Southeast Asia, a great deal of that paperwork still happens over WhatsApp messages, phone calls and printed invoices stuffed in a drawer. Borong, a company out of Kuala Lumpur, decided that mess was worth turning into software.

The bet has aged well. In March 2026, the Financial Times named Borong the fastest-growing company in the entire Asia-Pacific region - No.1 out of 500 firms across 13 economies, and the only Malaysian company to hold the top spot. A year earlier it had come second. Two rankings, back to back, for a company that started life selling other people's inventory.

From dropshipping to the plumbing of trade

Borong began in 2017 as Dropee, a small dropshipping outfit founded by Lennise Ng, Aizat Rahim and Haslind Rasip. Dropshipping - reselling goods you never physically hold - has a low ceiling. The founders kept running into the same wall their customers hit: buying wholesale in Malaysia was slow, opaque and cash-hungry. Retailers could not easily find suppliers. Suppliers could not easily reach retailers. And almost nobody could get credit.

So the company pointed itself at the wall. Along the way it picked up outside validation that most Malaysian startups never see: a spot in Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch, working with partner Gustaf Alstromer, and a USD 7 million Series A in early 2022 led by Vynn Capital. In December 2023 it dropped the Dropee name and became Borong - the Bahasa Melayu word for "wholesale." The rename read as a statement of intent.

It resonates with us as a platform for wholesale and B2B trading. As a company whose mission is to uplift grassroot economies, it is important that our name reminds us of where we started - in Malaysia. Lennise Ng, CEO and Co-Founder

What Borong actually does

Borong describes itself as a neutral B2B eProcurement platform. Unpacked, that means three things bolted together: a marketplace where businesses discover and buy from vetted suppliers, software that manages the buying process inside a company, and financing that lets buyers pay later and suppliers get paid sooner. The word "neutral" matters - Borong does not favour its own brands, because it does not sell its own brands. It runs the rails.

• 01
  Borong MarketplaceAn open wholesale network of 37,900+ vetted suppliers and 4.1M+ SKUs, where buyers discover products and order in bulk.
• 02
  Borong ProcureeProcurement software that digitises a company's internal purchasing - approval matrices, vendor management, spend visibility.
• 03
  Borong CreditEmbedded trade financing and buy-now-pay-later lines wired into the order itself, backed by USD 270M in committed banking capacity.
• 04
  MIDASAn AI price-benchmarking and spend-intelligence tool that flags when a buyer is overpaying and points to savings.
• 05
  Borong Direct & Invoice FinancingA direct selling channel for suppliers to reach enterprise buyers, plus working-capital advances on outstanding invoices.

Petronas and the corner shop, same rails

The clever part of Borong's design is who it serves at once. On one end sit multinationals and state-linked giants - Petronas, Nestlé, Shell, Maybank Islamic, Unilever Food Solutions, British American Tobacco, MR.DIY, the wholesale chain Mydin. On the other end sit the micro, small and medium businesses that make up the bulk of the region's economy and that banks and enterprise software usually skip. Both buy on the same platform. Same software, wildly different scale.

A sample of named enterprise customers.

Borong started with a mission to digitise traditional supply chains for underserved micro, small and medium-sized enterprises.

Serving both ends at once is not just good marketing - it is what makes the network worth anything. A marketplace is only useful if the other side of the trade shows up. By pulling in blue-chip enterprise demand, Borong gives thousands of small suppliers a reason to list; by aggregating those suppliers, it gives large buyers a catalogue deep enough to matter. Each side makes the other side more valuable, which is the quiet engine under the growth numbers.

The problem it solves

Ng has framed the company's job as fixing three things at once: helping businesses find products, get competitive prices, and access financing. Any one of those is a company. Solving all three on a single platform is what makes Borong sticky - a retailer who sources through Borong, checks prices with MIDAS, and pays with Borong Credit has little reason to leave.

That is also where the financing piece stops being a feature and becomes the point. Credit at the moment of purchase - RM1.1 billion of it extended so far - lets a small buyer place an order it could not otherwise afford, and lets a supplier close a sale it would otherwise lose. Money is the reason people stay.

Making that work required partners most software companies never touch. Borong has built financing relationships with UOB, Bank Simpanan Nasional and Agrobank, and distribution ties with the likes of DKSH and Mydin. The credit lines sit on USD 270 million of committed banking capacity - the kind of number that turns a buy-now-pay-later button from a promise into a working facility. It is unglamorous plumbing, and it is hard for a pure marketplace or a pure lender to assemble alone.

The AI layer, MIDAS, plays a similarly quiet role. Rather than a chatbot bolted to the homepage, it benchmarks prices across millions of SKUs and tells a buyer when a quote is out of line. There is no theatre to it - just an answer to a question procurement teams ask every day: are we overpaying? Applied to a catalogue of 4.1 million items, that question is worth real money.

How it's different

Global players like Alibaba.com move enormous volume but are a long way from a Malaysian retailer's day-to-day. Legacy procurement software such as SAP Ariba or Coupa was built for large enterprises and priced accordingly. Regional B2B marketplaces in Indonesia and India tend to hold inventory or push their own brands. Borong's angle is to stay neutral, stay local, and fold financing directly into the transaction - a combination that is hard to copy piecemeal.

Business model

Borong is a SaaS-enabled marketplace, and it earns money in three ways. It takes a cut of marketplace transactions. It charges subscription fees for procurement software like Borong Procure. And it earns a spread on the credit and invoice financing running through the platform. Enterprise buyers pay for tooling; suppliers pay for demand and working capital. The model monetises both sides of the same trade.

The recognition

Where it fits

Wholesale trade across Southeast Asia is huge and famously fragmented - millions of small businesses buying from millions of small suppliers, mostly offline. Borong is trying to be the digital layer underneath all of it: discovery, ordering, payment and credit in one place, market by market. It already operates in Malaysia and Indonesia, with Thailand and Vietnam named as the next targets. The stated goal - help one million MSMEs grow - is deliberately unglamorous and deliberately large.

The company keeps its identity close to that mission. A team of roughly 160 people, headquartered on Lingkaran Syed Putra in Kuala Lumpur, talks about uplifting grassroots economies rather than disrupting anything. The choice to name the business after a local word for wholesale, in a market where founders often reach for Silicon Valley branding, fits the same pattern. It is a company that seems comfortable being from where it is from - and, increasingly, being measured against companies that are not.

There is a certain irony in a company reaching the top of a Financial Times list by selling the least exciting thing in commerce. But that is often where the durable businesses hide. Nobody dreams about purchase orders. Borong built a business on them.