The Malaysian battery replacement startup supercharging to IPO

Update: July 19, 2024, 10:52 PM SGT: This article was updated to add Japan’s SBI Group as an investor in Bateriku’s Series B raise.

Bateriku is a Kuala Lumpur-based roadside assistance tech firm that on the face of it may be pretty “boring,” at least according to its founder and CEO Azarol Faizi.

But the company’s sound fundamentals have garnered it attention from investors. Its filings show that it has been in the black for the past five financial years.

A Bateriku pit stop / Photo credit: Bateriku

Bateriku – which provides a wide range of roadside assistance services, including producing its own batteries – recently completed an undisclosed series B raise involving three investors: Malaysia’s public pensions purse Retirement Fund Inc, Kuala Lumpur-based private VC firm Gobi Partners, and a joint-venture between state-owned agency VentureTech and Japan’s SBI Group (SBI VentureTech).

Azarol tells Tech in Asia that the money will be put to use across the next 18 months to expand Bateriku’s services.

The Malaysian firm is also among a handful of startups earmarked by the government to be a unicorn. The company is also eyeing a listing on the country’s stock exchange, Bursa Malaysia.

So what does it do, and why is there buzz around a company that offers a common service?

From B2B to B2C

Azarol tells us that the idea of starting Bateriku stemmed from his own experience in the auto industry. At that time, the focus was on internal combustion engine (ICE) cars.

An engineer by training, with work experience in a number of multinationals such as Hyundai, he discovered a gap in the market after visiting the manufacturing plant of Malaysian car automaker Proton.

There, he found that the company was using conventional batteries that required maintenance. Some of these batteries were replaced just before shipping a new car to the customer.

“There were a number of problems, such as cost and the timeline from when the car sits in the showroom to when it’s handed over to the customer,” he says.

Then an idea sparked: selling maintenance-free batteries and installing inhouse battery recharging services to ensure batteries installed in vehicles remain fully charged. Azarol waded into the industry and landed Proton as his first customer after participating in an open tender exercise.

He then secured a contract to provide such batteries to Perodua Sales, the sales arm of Malaysia’s second national automaker.

By the bootstraps

Seeking partnerships

Going unicorn?