About Dato’ Seri Ivan Teh

The company he founded

Dato’ Seri Ivan Teh is the founder and Group Chief Executive Officer of Fusionex, a data technology company specialising in analytics, big data management, machine learning, the internet of things and artificial intelligence. Its work is directed at helping organisations derive usable insight from data they already hold but cannot interpret.

The client base spans Fortune 500 and FTSE companies, large conglomerates and small and medium enterprises across the United States, Europe and the Asia Pacific region. That combination is unusual. Most enterprise software companies serving customers at that scale are headquartered in North America or Western Europe, and the decision to build from Malaysia instead was a deliberate one rather than an accident of geography.

Why the regional base mattered

When the company began commercialising big data analytics, the prevailing assumption in enterprise procurement was that serious analytics platforms came from elsewhere. Selling into Fortune 500 accounts from Southeast Asia meant overcoming that assumption on every deal, which in practice meant the product had to be demonstrably better rather than merely competitive.

That pressure shows up in the recognition the company later received. Analyst inclusion in assessments from Gartner and IDC is not granted on the strength of a marketing campaign. It follows from briefings, customer references and product evaluation, and being the only company based in the ASEAN region to appear in both is a specific, checkable claim rather than a general one.

National programme standing

The company holds Global Acceleration and Innovation Network status with the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation, and is a recipient under the Malaysia Digital Grant Scheme. Both are national instruments intended to support Malaysian technology companies competing internationally.

Beyond the business

Ivan Teh is a frequent speaker at international technology forums, where his contributions tend toward the practical questions of deployment rather than the speculative ones: what artificial intelligence can reliably do in an operational setting, where it should not be used, and what obligations fall on the organisations deploying it.

He is also active in philanthropic work covering education, healthcare and environmental causes, described in detail across the community section and the newsroom. He is a recipient of the Paul Harris Fellow recognition from Rotary for support of humanitarian and educational work.